We're all familiar with the terms lions led by donkeys, chateau generals, Napoleonic War mindset etc etc
And given the appalling losses suffered by all sides during the conflict, the generals have borne the blunt of the blame over the years, but is it really that simple?
For sure, Conrad von Hötzendorf should not have been entrusted with an empty cardboard box, let alone millions of Austrian-Hungarian troops, whilst Luigi Cadorna could have served Italy best by jumping off a cliff in 1915!
And of course Douglas Haig remains a controversial figure in Britain to this day.
But consider the following:
The sheer scale of industrial warfare that took everybody by surprise.
The pressure on generals to have the boys home for Christmas, therefore forcing them into quick attacks.
The difficult learning curve needed to overcome the trench and the machine gun.
Transport in its infancy i.e cars and tracked vehicles, which made defending easier than attacking e.g trains rushing in reinforcements for the defender, whilst the attacker slogs over a crater filled wasteland
The evolution of tactics from 1914 to 1918 showing lessons learned: e.g compare platoon size and armament in 1918 to 1914. Combined arms tactics were learnt, but at a high cost.
The surprisingly high numbers of generals killed and captured during the war...
To be honest, I'm on the fence on this one when it comes to critically assessing WW1 generals. Not every general yearned for a glorious Waterloo style cavaly charge.
What does dakka think?
And in response to feedback and complaints, the poll question matches the title of this thread!
Of course not all were bad, but not all were good and considering the vast number of lives lost in tactics that were, repeatability proven to fail, does suggest that there were some critical failings going on that passed high up the chain of command.
A general is nothing without an army so its rare that only the general could be the only element in the wrong; but they are the icon that marks the fact that it was the upper ranks view, perception and direction of the war that resulted in massive casualties and the use of tactics that were ineffective in a very new warfront. Also it got highlighted, because unlike many wars before where you'd have a few pitched battles and once the main armies met it was sort of over once the battle was done - in this you had a very prolonged trench war which ground the war on and on and on.
Overread wrote: Of course not all were bad, but not all were good and considering the vast number of lives lost in tactics that were, repeatability proven to fail, does suggest that there were some critical failings going on that passed high up the chain of command.
A general is nothing without an army so its rare that only the general could be the only element in the wrong; but they are the icon that marks the fact that it was the upper ranks view, perception and direction of the war that resulted in massive casualties and the use of tactics that were ineffective in a very new warfront. Also it got highlighted, because unlike many wars before where you'd have a few pitched battles and once the main armies met it was sort of over once the battle was done - in this you had a very prolonged trench war which ground the war on and on and on.
In defence of the generals, a lot of air force pilots were lost, and a lot of ships were sunk with high naval losses...
It took a long time for the British Admiralty to get a grip on the U-Boat problem, so incompetence was prevalent in the other service branches, not just the army.
I think the reputation of callous butchers that Britain's generals have in the popular perception is one that is wholly undeserved. While their conduct of the war can certainly be criticised, actually examining the evidence debunks a lot of the myths that the more traditionalist school of thought would have you believe.
For instance, the idea that they all sat in French chateaus miles behind the lines is completely overstated. In fact, in 1915, British HQ actually had to issue an order against high-ranking officers from spending too much time with the troops near the front as too many were getting injured or killed. 78 British generals in total were killed in action, which is a significant figure that doesn't really square with the idea that they were all sitting miles behind the front drinking champagne and eating fine food. The reason Allied headquarters were so often based in chateaus and mansions has far more to do with them being large enough to facilitate the number of personnel needed to actually run an army rather than any concerns over making the high ranks comfortable.
Another common misconception is this idea that they were all old-fashioned cavalry officers, unwilling to try new methods or technology and totally out of their depth. The truth in that is that yes, their military experience was largely of pre-industrialised warfare and yes, they were initially out of their depth, but only because the nature of the First World War changed warfare so instantly and dramatically that no one in 1914 could ever have had the adequate training or experience. In fact, I'd suggest the British generals were among the most effective when it came to adapting to the new way of warfare. They were the first to put tanks into action, had arguably the most successful air force for most of the war, and while they lagged behind in some areas (mission-oriented command, at the tactical level, for instance, came about rather slowly in the British army compared to the German army) I think it's fair to say a general progression can be easily observed. By 1918, you can see massive progress in all levels, with the Hundred Days offensive representing one of the most successful offensive operations of the war. Combined arms, effective planning and a coordinated and disciplined advance broke the Hindenburg line and was at least in large part responsible for the Allied victory.
As for the rates of attrition, encapsulated in the popular imagination by the first day of the Somme and often the main criticism levelled at the British command, a key thing to remember is that Britain (and France) had to be fighting an offensive war at that point. The initial German advance had captured enough ground that to simply stay on the defensive would be to cede large amounts of French and Belgian land to Germany, while the Germans could stay defensive and dig in at their convenience. Charging across an open field at machine guns might not be particularly effective, but ultimately, if the enemy are on the other side of a field and have machine guns, and you need force them back, you don't have a lot of options. To use the Somme as an example, it's hardly a bull-headed waste of life. Its aims were strategically valid (remove German pressure from the French at Verdun, push back along a wide front), there was adequate preparation (extensive mining under German lines, aerial recon and coordinated planning) and actually saw new methods and technology (most notably the tank and new artillery techniques) being implemented, all of which runs counter to the idea that Haig simply sat down one morning and said 'you know what, let's do The Somme' which a lot of people seem to believe. The attack itself might have failed, but the planning, preparation and conduct of it do not suggest callousness or incompetence, and to say the offensive was pointless is to entirely misread the nature of the war.
So yes, I'm firmly in the revisionist camp on this one. Certainly, there are individuals to be criticised and plenty of criticism to be levelled, but in terms of how the war was conducted, I think the British Generalship gets a highly undeserved reputation. If you want to 'blame' something for the immense loss of life and the lack of progress made over portions of the period, I think that has to be considered a product of the dynamics of industrial war. It was the machine gun, the artillery and the fortification of lines that created a situation whereby every inch of ground taken had to come at great cost. Generals were forced to adapt to this and at time, may not have done the best job in the world of it, but they consistently endeavoured to make it better, not worse as some would have you believe.
It took a long time for the British Admiralty to get a grip on the U-Boat problem, so incompetence was prevalent in the other service branches, not just the army.
I'm not sure you can correlate incompetence with inexperience, or with the scale of the losses. The navy is outside my wheelhouse so I'll avoid that, but when it comes to the Royal Flying Corps, aside from a few short periods (the Fokker Scourge and Bloody April) I'd say the leadership learned very rapidly, adapting effectively and operated appropriately.
Trenchard is often considered the 'Haig of the air' on account of his pursuit of an offensive doctrine (particularly in 1916-18). However, much like Haig, this can be seen as a necessity and a valid approach. Trenchard understood that for air operations to have any usefulness whatsoever, you actually had to be able to operate over the front. Yes, this meant a large-scale and costly offensive had to be maintained against the German Air Service, but without that, there was no scope for the RFC to conduct aerial recon, artillery spotting, photography, bombing, ground support, all the roles that actually made them useful to the army as a whole.
Much like Haig's offensives on the ground, Trenchard's operations over the Somme were not just casually throwing away pilots and aircraft, they were part of a concerted effort to actually achieve something, based in sound doctrine and within the scope of the RFC's capability. If anything, they were more successful than on the ground, as by July 1916 the German Air Service was entirely on the defensive; its aerodromes bombed to bits, its numbers depleted and the RFC left free to conduct vital supporting roles over the Somme as the offensive began.
The circumstances surrounding the death of Lord Kitchener, when his ship struck a mine near Scapa Flow, en route to Russia, has to be one of the worst levels of incompetence I have ever read about regarding the Royal Navy. So yeah, actions like that, can't be chalked up to inexperience. And of course, the Gallipoli debacle, with the Navy's failure to neutralise Turkish gun positions, is another black mark against the Royal Navy.
I take nothing away from the Navy, who have went above and beyond for Britain, on so many occasions, but WW1 was not their finest hour IMO.
As to haig, it's often overlooked that Gough and Rawlinson did a lot of the planning for the Somme, but in saying that, when it was clear the offensive was going nowhere, Haig should have pulled the plug on it, rather than continue to suffer further losses.
Fair points regarding the navy, as I say that's not something I've really looked into so I'm inclined to agree there.
As for simply calling off the Somme, I'm not sure how viable that would have been. Say you get to August and it's clear the initial advance has failed, pulling back at that point gives the Germans at least 3 months of fighting time before winter set in to launch a counterattack against a massively depleted British army which could well have broken it. By keeping up the offensive, the Germans are at least prevented from launching that manner and scale of counterattack, even if it was costly to do so.
There's also the issue of morale, which is rather more nebulous; while British morale likely sagged after the immense early losses, it may well have been the case that simply calling the whole thing off would do even more damage; While the early 20th century 'Cult of the Offensive' among European commanders overstates things, it's probably fair to say than army fighting aggressively (even with limited results) will have a stronger moral core than one that has suffered an unmitigated disaster and retreated, and then has to sit in place for a few months knowing that was all for nothing and that the enemy could overwhelm them at any moment. As demoralising as constant attacks likely were, I think you could at least argue that admitting the failure of the early offensive and withdrawing might be even more of a drain on morale. I guess the French mutinies stand as a counterpoint to that though, given that they were a refusal to take further offensive action rather than a refusal to fight at all.
No one had faced a major war in Europe for maybe 100 years. The only battles where smaller colonial fights but nothing anywhere near the scale. The continent did not have a major infrastructure to support a large army like Europe.
One of thr largest was the Zulu wars when UK deployed around 20,000 men. Even then they pushed the limit of the capability.
The generals have no experience in the scale or warfare, the machine guns, massed artillery, this was a entirely new form, scale and type of warfare. The largest battles in Africa, middle east. USA, no one had anything like scale of WW1
Same with submarines. No one had ever used them.
The early war was part a brutal, bloody learning curve.
At end of day. Tanks. Plans, machine guns, artillery and submarines had never been used on such a scale, so widely and trench warfare was new.
Defense advantages where enormous and almost like seige warfare than anything else. Many ainciant examples require serious numerical advantage to win, and even then its bloody..
All considered.
Alot of generals did not know at start did not know quite how to work in this new age. Everything had to reinvented and that is not a easy task.
No one had faced a major war in Europe for maybe 100 years. The only battles where smaller colonial fights but nothing anywhere near the scale. The continent did not have a major infrastructure to support a large army like Europe.
One of thr largest was the Zulu wars when UK deployed around 20,000 men. Even then they pushed the limit of the capability.
The generals have no experience in the scale or warfare, the machine guns, massed artillery, this was a entirely new form, scale and type of warfare. The largest battles in Africa, middle east. USA, no one had anything like scale of WW1
Same with submarines. No one had ever used them.
The early war was part a brutal, bloody learning curve.
At end of day. Tanks. Plans, machine guns, artillery and submarines had never been used on such a scale, so widely and trench warfare was new.
Defense advantages where enormous and almost like seige warfare than anything else. Many ainciant examples require serious numerical advantage to win, and even then its bloody..
All considered.
Alot of generals did not know at start did not know quite how to work in this new age. Everything had to reinvented and that is not a easy task.
I'm not sure.
The Russo-Japanese War was a pretty bloody conflict, and that had only been 10 years before or something, and all the European powers, and the USA who sent a young MacArthur, sent observers, who reported back on how bloody it was, especially the effective use of Japanese artillery, but sadly, the warnings from the observers were ignored.
There is off course the lessons from the American Civil War, whch were either ignored or not known about...
You have to remember that the Boer War was equally in recent memory alongside the Russo-Japanese war and actually had British participants (the other was limited primarily to Royal Navy observers). Saying that they should have looked at both wars and said that 'this one is the right one to learn from and this one wasn't' is something you can only do with hindsight.
Not only that, they went to great lengths to try and learn/plan from the Boer War. There are fat stacks of documents in the British National Archives on that specific subject if anyone wants to go and take a look.
The Russo-Japanese War was a pretty bloody conflict, and that had only been 10 years before or something, and all the European powers, and the USA who sent a young MacArthur, sent observers, who reported back on how bloody it was, especially the effective use of Japanese artillery, but sadly, the warnings from the observers were ignored. There is off course the lessons from the American Civil War, whch were either ignored or not known about...
The civil war was ancient history at that point, but Russia vs Japan was something that did shock the European powers. It was almost inconceivable that some backwards far eastern country could build up so quickly and beat one of the strongest "Old Powers" in war! Various aid and political manuevering bailed Russia out and forced Japan to back down though, so maybe it was seen as more of a curiosity than a change in warfare? Russian incompetence and Japanese double-dealing (for surely the japs couldn't beat Europeans in honest war)?
Ketara wrote: You have to remember that the Boer War was equally in recent memory alongside the Russo-Japanese war and actually had British participants (the other was limited primarily to Royal Navy observers). Saying that they should have looked at both wars and said that 'this one is the right one to learn from and this one wasn't' is something you can only do with hindsight.
Not only that, they went to great lengths to try and learn/plan from the Boer War. There are fat stacks of documents in the British National Archives on that specific subject if anyone wants to go and take a look.
There was ten years between the Boer War, the Russo-Japanese war, and WW1. Plenty of time for lessons to be learned, studies to be done etc etc
One of the first things the Germans did after WW1 was ask themselves why they had lost it. Their conclusions obviously led to their doctrine for WW2.
The Russo-Japanese War was a pretty bloody conflict, and that had only been 10 years before or something, and all the European powers, and the USA who sent a young MacArthur, sent observers, who reported back on how bloody it was, especially the effective use of Japanese artillery, but sadly, the warnings from the observers were ignored. There is off course the lessons from the American Civil War, whch were either ignored or not known about...
The civil war was ancient history at that point, but Russia vs Japan was something that did shock the European powers. It was almost inconceivable that some backwards far eastern country could build up so quickly and beat one of the strongest "Old Powers" in war! Various aid and political manuevering bailed Russia out and forced Japan to back down though, so maybe it was seen as more of a curiosity than a change in warfare? Russian incompetence and Japanese double-dealing (for surely the japs couldn't beat Europeans in honest war)?
Ketara's an expert on Russia's military/armaments pre-WW1, but from my limited reading, the Russians actually did implement a lot of changes in their army as a result of the Japan debacle.
There was ten years between the Boer War, the Russo-Japanese war, and WW1. Plenty of time for lessons to be learned, studies to be done etc etc
The British made considerable efforts to observe and learn from the Russo-Japanese war; far more than any other nation. The concept of a general staff and forward planning were extremely new for the British Army at that point however. The British Army Council and General Staff were only created in 1904. You have to remember that the bulk of funding/attention went tot he Royal Navy, not the British Army. They did spend some considerable time and effort overhauling their artillery however, coming up with plans for war in Europe, and several other things.
To put it bluntly, you can say 'they didn't do this', but that's because you're ignoring all the things that they did right; on account of the fact that your attention isn't drawn to it. Nobody when writing a history of the war says, 'this particular Victorian logistical supply chain procedure was overhauled successfully' because they're too busy writing about how the British had no howitzers. Nobody says, 'the Royal Family were finally extracted like a sore bloody tooth from the command structure' because they're laughing at how Kitchener announced new armies with no weapons to give them. To give a direct parallel, everyone is so busy pointing at the fact that machine guns were treated like artillery doctrinally, but fail to give credit for the fact that the new Vickers machine gun had been successfully trialled, tested, and rolled out (albeit in small numbers).
Nobody ever notices the things that are done right. It's like the news today; all that gets reported is stuff that goes wrong. The NHS never gets a headline reading 'Everything going quite well for the last week'.
The pre-war British Army did some things right, and some things wrong. Some of those things done wrong were the result of politics, financial constraints, or other relevant aspects. But the sheer complexity can't really be summed in a 'Did they do it right or not', anymore than the question at the top of this page can be.
Ketara's an expert on Russia's military/armaments pre-WW1, but from my limited reading, the Russians actually did implement a lot of changes in their army as a result of the Japan debacle.
More British than Russsian I'm afraid. I can usually pinpoint continental sources when I need them, but I'm not quite bilingual yet.
There was ten years between the Boer War, the Russo-Japanese war, and WW1. Plenty of time for lessons to be learned, studies to be done etc etc
The British made considerable efforts to observe and learn from the Russo-Japanese war; far more than any other nation. The concept of a general staff and forward planning were extremely new for the British Army at that point however. The British Army Council and General Staff were only created in 1904. You have to remember that the bulk of funding/attention went tot he Royal Navy, not the British Army. They did spend some considerable time and effort overhauling their artillery however, coming up with plans for war in Europe, and several other things.
To put it bluntly, you can say 'they didn't do this', but that's because you're ignoring all the things that they did right; on account of the fact that your attention isn't drawn to it. Nobody when writing a history of the war says, 'this particular Victorian logistical supply chain procedure was overhauled successfully' because they're too busy writing about how the British had no howitzers. Nobody says, 'the Royal Family were finally extracted like a sore bloody tooth from the command structure' because they're laughing at how Kitchener announced new armies with no weapons to give them. To give a direct parallel, everyone is so busy pointing at the fact that machine guns were treated like artillery doctrinally, but fail to give credit for the fact that the new Vickers machine gun had been successfully trialled, tested, and rolled out (albeit in small numbers).
Nobody ever notices the things that are done right. It's like the news today; all that gets reported is stuff that goes wrong. The NHS never gets a headline reading 'Everything going quite well for the last week'.
The pre-war British Army did some things right, and some things wrong. Some of those things done wrong were the result of politics, financial constraints, or other relevant aspects. But the sheer complexity can't really be summed in a 'Did they do it right or not', anymore than the question at the top of this page can be.
Ketara's an expert on Russia's military/armaments pre-WW1, but from my limited reading, the Russians actually did implement a lot of changes in their army as a result of the Japan debacle.
More British than Russsian I'm afraid. I can usually pinpoint continental sources when I need them, but I'm not quite bilingual yet.
A good post as always, but you've overlooked the fact that all the reforms in the world won't help the British Army when Sir John French is the man at the wheel!
To say he was a controversial figure is an understatement.
I'll say that when we talk about "generals," by WWI you need to distinguish between brigadiers or even division commanders, and that high command leading Corps, armies, and army groups. There were no shortage of capable flag officers, because there was high turnover.
When we look at high command, I think the biggest thing we can blame them for, at least on the Western Front, is insisting on doing "something" when it hasn't worked the prior time. After the Somme, the British didn't really learn that massive breakthroughs were unlikely, they just kept trying. Ditto the French offensives. The Germans, aside from Verdun, avoided offensives between the race to the Sea and 1918. OTOH, Austrian and especially Italian high command were very poor.
On the other hand, the Western Allies were pretty creative in ways to exploit strategic flanks, they just botched them badly, for example at Gallipoli. The Mesopotamian campaign was badly run, but eventually caused the ottomans to collapse.
The Salonica front was... there, I guess.
It's common to point to the Civil War for lessons on WWI, but as many are quick to point out, there aren't the sharp tactical or even stratgegic lessons there. The ACW was still fought in lines of battle, artillery could not destroy the most secure fortifications, and while the end of the war was trench warfare, Grant never reallyl figured out how to break a trench stalemate. The bigger, more real lesson from the civil war was about the economic realities of industrial war. In both the ACW and WWI, the victor carried out a successful naval blockade which caused economic collapse on the home front.
With 20/20 historical hindsight, we know that the Union in the ACW could have avoided every direct attack on Richmond, and simply fought in the west, splitting the confederacy, and starving the south out with blockade. Likewise, the Western Allies in WWI could have focused on reinforcing Russia, fighting in the Balkans and the Middle East, and waited out the starving Germans.
That's a great theoretical strategy... but it's hard to convince a government or a people that you're winning a war when you're sitting in trenches, ceding ground to the enemy.
Polonius wrote: I'll say that when we talk about "generals," by WWI you need to distinguish between brigadiers or even division commanders, and that high command leading Corps, armies, and army groups. There were no shortage of capable flag officers, because there was high turnover.
When we look at high command, I think the biggest thing we can blame them for, at least on the Western Front, is insisting on doing "something" when it hasn't worked the prior time. After the Somme, the British didn't really learn that massive breakthroughs were unlikely, they just kept trying. Ditto the French offensives. The Germans, aside from Verdun, avoided offensives between the race to the Sea and 1918. OTOH, Austrian and especially Italian high command were very poor.
On the other hand, the Western Allies were pretty creative in ways to exploit strategic flanks, they just botched them badly, for example at Gallipoli. The Mesopotamian campaign was badly run, but eventually caused the ottomans to collapse.
The Salonica front was... there, I guess.
It's common to point to the Civil War for lessons on WWI, but as many are quick to point out, there aren't the sharp tactical or even stratgegic lessons there. The ACW was still fought in lines of battle, artillery could not destroy the most secure fortifications, and while the end of the war was trench warfare, Grant never reallyl figured out how to break a trench stalemate. The bigger, more real lesson from the civil war was about the economic realities of industrial war. In both the ACW and WWI, the victor carried out a successful naval blockade which caused economic collapse on the home front.
With 20/20 historical hindsight, we know that the Union in the ACW could have avoided every direct attack on Richmond, and simply fought in the west, splitting the confederacy, and starving the south out with blockade. Likewise, the Western Allies in WWI could have focused on reinforcing Russia, fighting in the Balkans and the Middle East, and waited out the starving Germans.
That's a great theoretical strategy... but it's hard to convince a government or a people that you're winning a war when you're sitting in trenches, ceding ground to the enemy.
Fair points, but you have to consider that 1916 was a pivotal year in WW1, and doing something, as you say, could have led to victory.
Russia's Brusilov offensive of June 1916, almost knocked Austria-Hungary out of the war. A few weeks later in July, the Somme offensive started. This had obviously been loosely coordinated between Russia and its Western Allies.
Obviously, neither offensive worked, but I can't fault the logic of doing something at the time, even if the execution wasn't up to the mark.
As to your American civil War point, it's a good point, but the lessons of that conflict were also lost on you guys.
General Pershing was convinced that superior American marksmanship would give the doughboys the edge in combat. Sadly, the doughboys learned the harsh realities of trench warfare the hard way.
Every nation struggled to adapt to new realities of warfare.
Yeah, that's my point. Based on what they knew at the time, and the pressure from their governments, the commanding generals were focused on winning the war through offensive actions. That's also how every war prior had been won.
The real villains of this story aren't the generals, who spent a life time learning how to win wars through battles. It's the governments of both sides, that weren't willing to accept a negotiated peace.
I don't know about the Pershing remarks, it's possible he really felt that way, or it's possible he said it to boost morale. I do know that German High command saw American involvement as the beginning of the end, partially due to the loss of neutral ports, and also due to weight of numbers.
I think that looking at the situation, especially in the Western front, and trying to come up with a better strategy is actually really tough. We know now that the offensives there were mostly wastes of lives... but if any of them had worked, it could have saved lives.
I guess I would say that I'm not terribly impressed by much of the generalship on the Western Front, while the eastern, middle eastern, and Italian fronts were wildly mixed bags. Certainly in the Western Front, while I don't think much was done well, there's also a good argument to be made that it could not have been done better.
I've not done as much reading on the leadership in WW1 so much as I have the rank/file during the war, but I do have a few thoughts. . .
I think there were decent/competent generals in most armies, and there were definitely those who were anything but. I'm not sure who the French general was that was in charge of the 112th US infantry at the Battle of Fismet, but it was this precise battle that gave Pershing the ammunition he needed to say "american troops will serve under american command"
On the competence front, I think there's something to be said for the large scale "chess" game that went on. According to some books and whatnot I've been through, certain units performed better when faced with certain groups from the other side. IE, apparently the Bavarian regiments absolutely hated the Scottish Highland regiments (and vice versa), some Prussian units had a thing against counterparts from Belgium or England, etc. so the "game" for the generals became how to ensure the offensive/defensive goals of the campaign, and how to match up these units to ensure that fighting happened.
On the failure front, look at the troops "live and let live" policies (exception the groups I mentioned above) that most of the men in the trenches adopted. There are numerous stories of German soldiers liking the smell of the French food, signalling that he'd like to come over for a bite to eat (and being allowed to do so, without being captured!), or how a british officer telling his troops to fire on the German lines when they are eating. . . . The troops receive that order, and send a rock, with a note over to the Germans reading "we're being ordered to shell you while you eat, we will blow our whistle three blasts before we begin, so that you can cover your food. Don't hold it against us, just following orders."
Edit: I also think a "failure" (though it may be too strong a term) has to be in the political front: I've read far, far too much diary/letters/troop writing to not notice the trend that the enlisted core of each army truly believed that they were fighting someone else's war, for no gain on their part. They didn't believe that if they didn't fight, they'd lose their homes (well, the French perhaps did have existential crises) and existence. This is something that I think was done to much greater effect in WW2 and beyond (for those countries who have remained militarily active post-ww2)
No one had faced a major war in Europe for maybe 100 years. The only battles where smaller colonial fights but nothing anywhere near the scale. The continent did not have a major infrastructure to support a large army like Europe.
Not correct. To name a few:
Franco Prussian War-between the two big competitors no less.
Crimean War
Greek War for Independence
Russo Japanese War
You can name in one hand very few decent generals (Foche for example) at the corps level or higher. For YEARS they did the same thing. Sure they added in tanks, aircraft, gas. But at the end of the day every side decided to keep launching millions of men across No Man's Land in bad weather.
Further, the statements themselves by many of the generals are horrific in their lack of concern for casualties. Even Zhukov would have blanched at some of these guys.
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Polonius wrote: I'll say that when we talk about "generals," by WWI you need to distinguish between brigadiers or even division commanders, and that high command leading Corps, armies, and army groups. There were no shortage of capable flag officers, because there was high turnover.
When we look at high command, I think the biggest thing we can blame them for, at least on the Western Front, is insisting on doing "something" when it hasn't worked the prior time. After the Somme, the British didn't really learn that massive breakthroughs were unlikely, they just kept trying. Ditto the French offensives. The Germans, aside from Verdun, avoided offensives between the race to the Sea and 1918. OTOH, Austrian and especially Italian high command were very poor.
On the other hand, the Western Allies were pretty creative in ways to exploit strategic flanks, they just botched them badly, for example at Gallipoli. The Mesopotamian campaign was badly run, but eventually caused the ottomans to collapse.
The Salonica front was... there, I guess.
It's common to point to the Civil War for lessons on WWI, but as many are quick to point out, there aren't the sharp tactical or even stratgegic lessons there. The ACW was still fought in lines of battle, artillery could not destroy the most secure fortifications, and while the end of the war was trench warfare, Grant never reallyl figured out how to break a trench stalemate. The bigger, more real lesson from the civil war was about the economic realities of industrial war. In both the ACW and WWI, the victor carried out a successful naval blockade which caused economic collapse on the home front.
With 20/20 historical hindsight, we know that the Union in the ACW could have avoided every direct attack on Richmond, and simply fought in the west, splitting the confederacy, and starving the south out with blockade. Likewise, the Western Allies in WWI could have focused on reinforcing Russia, fighting in the Balkans and the Middle East, and waited out the starving Germans.
That's a great theoretical strategy... but it's hard to convince a government or a people that you're winning a war when you're sitting in trenches, ceding ground to the enemy.
Polonius has the way of it.
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Edit: I also think a "failure" (though it may be too strong a term) has to be in the political front: I've read far, far too much diary/letters/troop writing to not notice the trend that the enlisted core of each army truly believed that they were fighting someone else's war, for no gain on their part. They didn't believe that if they didn't fight, they'd lose their homes (well, the French perhaps did have existential crises) and existence. This is something that I think was done to much greater effect in WW2 and beyond (for those countries who have remained militarily active post-ww2)
All of them WERE fighting someone else's war, except the Serbs. Everyone involved had an empire they were protecting or trying to expand, except maybe the US. Further, many of the belligerents involved were led by royalties who were actually closely related to each other.
Frankly it all could have been avoided if the Kaiser stepped in to negotiate a calm down between the Austrian Empire and the Russian Empire, or let them chew each other up. Literally every power except Serbia and Austria went to war because it was sticking its nose in someone else's business.
One other thing to keep in mind about the whole "Why didn't they learn from the American Civil War?" debate: the generalship in that conflict, outside of a small handful of commanders, was highly flawed. McClelland famously frittered away a couple of opportunities due to timidity, and Meade's counter offensive after Gettysburg is one of history's great lost chances.
If I were attending a war college in the late Victorian era, and I read about the ACW, I'd see missed opportunities all over the place. You can make the very real argument that McClelland's aversion to causalities extended the war.
Polonius wrote: One other thing to keep in mind about the whole "Why didn't they learn from the American Civil War?" debate: the generalship in that conflict, outside of a small handful of commanders, was highly flawed. McClelland famously frittered away a couple of opportunities due to timidity, and Meade's counter offensive after Gettysburg is one of history's great lost chances.
If I were attending a war college in the late Victorian era, and I read about the ACW, I'd see missed opportunities all over the place. You can make the very real argument that McClelland's aversion to causalities extended the war.
But then you would look at the casualties at Cold Harbor, Fredericksburg, Antietam, and Chickamauga, and the trenches at Petersberg, and you should have realized, frontal assaults are bad. Frontal assaults usually lost. Outside of Chatanooga I cannot think of one that actually worked against even minimal entrenched positions.
The Franco Prussian War and Russo Japanese War would have reinforced that. Indeed, we should remember that the advent of (then) modern artillery was viewed almost in nukelike terms, which turned out to be entirely prophetic.
OT, but I was watching a presentation on Gettysberg. it was enlightening. If one looks at what Lee thought the union positions were on Day 2, the attacks that were intended for Longstreet look very reasonable, almost Chancellorsville esque as they would have hit only the absolute edge of the supposed Union position and then drove in behind and effectively rolled up the flank. Fortunately the union line was further down than anticipated and stretched further when a Union colonel saw hood's forces in movement.
The Russo-Japanese War showed that determined infantry frontal assaults could work, at the cost of high casualties, and failed to reveal an alternative.
This led the western front generals to adopt this as the basis of their infantry offensives.
The eventual alternatives involved tanks and precision artillery barrages, which weren't possible at the time, and also infiltration tactics.
Automatically Appended Next Post: The key difference on the western front was that the objectives were too large to be captured in a single day's operations.
When the assault units succeeded -- which they did at Verdun and the Somme, at the cost of major casualties -- they got out of communication and line of supply of their supports.
This made it easy for the defenders' second line units to mount a successful counter attack.
The Western Front of WWI was actually pretty unique, because it combined geography, demography, and technology at a very specific point. Basically, it was the first time that you could run a front line from Switzerland to the Channel and have it all fully defended. That requires massive mobilization in a relatively small area. Further, not only were there plenty of troops to stretch across the front, you had copious reserves, and often multiple lines (albeit not the classic defense in depth from Kursk and later).
With no ability to outflank, frontal assaults are the only tactic left. What every offensive showed is that they actually worked... to a point. The problem is the lack of breakthrough, caused by the multiple lines and reserves of the defender, and the limited communication and transport capacity to exploit any gains. Even 10-15 years later, you'd be seeing maturing Automotive and radio industries that would allow for better exploitation of breaks in lines.
Easy E wrote: You really need to narrow this down to the Wetsern Front in Europe I think.
I'm going Pole to Pole
On a serious note, there blunders in Africa, the Middle East, the Far East, and the Eastern Front, so limiting it to the Western Front narrows the discussion, in my humble opinion.
On the Italian front, huge blunders were made at battles of the Isonzo river. If memory serves, the Italian war plans ended up being published in an Austrian newspaper or something (or vice versa) and Cardona still refused to alter his plans, even when he found out about it
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Polonius wrote: One other thing to keep in mind about the whole "Why didn't they learn from the American Civil War?" debate: the generalship in that conflict, outside of a small handful of commanders, was highly flawed. McClelland famously frittered away a couple of opportunities due to timidity, and Meade's counter offensive after Gettysburg is one of history's great lost chances.
If I were attending a war college in the late Victorian era, and I read about the ACW, I'd see missed opportunities all over the place. You can make the very real argument that McClelland's aversion to causalities extended the war.
Forgot to mention this earlier
But from a British POV, the British really were scathing about anything American related back then. In this day and age, yeah, we're used to the Special Relationship, but even up to WW2, the British didn't rate the Americans too highly, considering them to be naive amateurs in foreign diplomacy and military matters, so it's unlikely that the British would have wanted to learn anything from the American Civil War.
If you're familiar with Haig's diaries, he obviously had meetings with Pershing, and obviously, for the sake of the alliance, it was all cordial, but the diary entries can be summed up as thus: What the feth do the Americans think we've been doing for 3 years!
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Kilkrazy wrote: The Russo-Japanese War showed that determined infantry frontal assaults could work, at the cost of high casualties, and failed to reveal an alternative.
This led the western front generals to adopt this as the basis of their infantry offensives.
The eventual alternatives involved tanks and precision artillery barrages, which weren't possible at the time, and also infiltration tactics.
Automatically Appended Next Post: The key difference on the western front was that the objectives were too large to be captured in a single day's operations.
When the assault units succeeded -- which they did at Verdun and the Somme, at the cost of major casualties -- they got out of communication and line of supply of their supports.
This made it easy for the defenders' second line units to mount a successful counter attack.
Apologies for the spelling error as I'm on the move, but I would disagree with your point about objectives. Yeah, you're not going to march from Germany to Paris in a single day, but the German advance in 1914, the Schieffling plan (yes that's not how you spell it )
shows how rapid the early weeks of the war were. The BEF nearly got cut off in Belgium. Russia advanced quickly through East Prussia. Germany nearly made it to Paris.
Given what I said earlier about pressure being on generals to finish it by Christmas, the war of rapid movement nearly worked in 1914, and I can't be too critical of the generals for giving the dice a roll.
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Polonius wrote: The Western Front of WWI was actually pretty unique, because it combined geography, demography, and technology at a very specific point. Basically, it was the first time that you could run a front line from Switzerland to the Channel and have it all fully defended. That requires massive mobilization in a relatively small area. Further, not only were there plenty of troops to stretch across the front, you had copious reserves, and often multiple lines (albeit not the classic defense in depth from Kursk and later).
With no ability to outflank, frontal assaults are the only tactic left. What every offensive showed is that they actually worked... to a point. The problem is the lack of breakthrough, caused by the multiple lines and reserves of the defender, and the limited communication and transport capacity to exploit any gains. Even 10-15 years later, you'd be seeing maturing Automotive and radio industries that would allow for better exploitation of breaks in lines.
I'll say to you what I said to Kilkrazy: I think you're overlooking how quickly the armies advanced in the early weeks of WW1.
There were no trenches for a start. At the Battle of Mons, the British were fighting German columns that marched on them like something out of the Battle of Waterloo!
The cavalry clashes were also pretty fast moving and brutal.
The outnumbered British Expeditionary force had to force march its way back to safety, lest it be cut off by the Germans. The speed was there in 1914.
If memory serves, the Germans were using Armoured cars to outflank the Russians in East Prussia in 1914.
Yeah, with hindsight, it went wrong, but like I say, I can't fault the generals for trying to win it quick. If the French didn't hang on outside Paris, the Germans might have beaten them in 1914...
Depends on which reputation you are talking about.
Reputation for being careless butchers? Not really.
Reputation for being naive and unable to adapt? Totally.
Basically the vast majority of WW1 generals were trained and educated in the 1800s. Napoleonic warfare strategies were all they knew and they were rather set in their ways. Likewise, training for individual soldiers hadn't really caught up with the new technology either. Military Tactics and Strategy were still firmly in the Smoothbore-Musket-Line-up-and-shoot-the-enemy-who-is-also-lined-up era.
So really the generals of WW1 were at worst naive fools who were set in their ways.
Honestly the invention of armored vehicles is all that prevented WW2 from being the same bloody stalemate. WW1 lacked that key component of warfare since the ability to construct defensive positions and have weapons capable of repelling direct frontal assaults meant the other option of brute forcing through a defended position was suicidal.
Prior to WW1, if the enemy was holding a fort you had options. 1) You either surrounded it and starved them out. 2) Pounded it with artillery and mounted a frontal assault. Trench warfare and machineguns made both of these options impossible. You couldn't surround a fortified position that for all practical purposes was several hundred miles long. Trenches were incredibly resistant to artillery, and machine guns meant a frontal assault would simply result in annihilation. And Cavalry as a mobile element didn't work because they were vulnerable to the same machine guns that infantry were.
Tanks broke this wide open because now a hundreds of miles long trench system could simply be bypassed. You drive over the trenches and break through and disrupt the supply lines behind it while your own infantry swarm through the gap. Which means that fortified positions now go back to being single strong points instead of a diffuse system. Which means they can be surrounded again. War then changes back to a game of maneuver and speed instead of attrition alone.
When the war started there were a lot of doctrines that were poorly suited to the new technologies of war. But a lot of adaptation happened really quickly, and it isn't easy to develop new tactics and have them adopted by conscript armies. At the Somme for instance the British knew about more sophisticated squad level tactics , but had little confidence that they could be used effectively by conscript troops seeing their first taste of war.
I think more than that, though, the war has come to defined by this idea of futile trench assaults across no man's land. It's not actually true. Most offensives reached the enemy trenches, and something like a third actually managed to capture at least the first wave objectives. The problem came after that, as the attacker was trying to establish if an attack worked based on man drawn wire lines and signal flags, and then deploy reinforcements by foot. Meanwhile the defender could be updated by telegraph, and bring in reinforcements by train. So most initially successful assaults were generally defeated by a quicker reacting counter-offensive.
It's fair to say that most armies failed to adapt to that reality quick enough. The British stuck with attempting deep breakthroughs until painfully long in to the war (at Amiens Haig still had his cavalry ready to exploit the hole made by the tanks). But given that even today most people don't realise or understand the primary challenge was the defender's advantages after the initial assault, I'm inclined to give the generals learning as they went something of a pass for failing to really address that problem at the time.
Do_I_Not_Like_That wrote: And of course, the Gallipoli debacle, with the Navy's failure to neutralise Turkish gun positions, is another black mark against the Royal Navy.
Gallipoli was the first contested landing in generations. It was a balls up and parts like the lack of HE rounds were terrible, but they were basically doing something completely new, mistakes will happen.
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Paradigm wrote: As for simply calling off the Somme, I'm not sure how viable that would have been. Say you get to August and it's clear the initial advance has failed, pulling back at that point gives the Germans at least 3 months of fighting time before winter set in to launch a counterattack against a massively depleted British army which could well have broken it. By keeping up the offensive, the Germans are at least prevented from launching that manner and scale of counterattack, even if it was costly to do so.
If you're at a point of weakness and fear a counter-attack, the last thing you do is keep up an attritional offensive. That wasn't the concern at all. Through the campaign the British and French doubled the Germans in the area, and the Germans had more than enough trouble with their own operation at Verdun.
The reason the Somme continued was because by the fairly cruel measures of the Western Front it worked. Casualties were roughly equal, the British and French lost a few more than the Germans, but not by much. And just as importantly it drew in more than a million additional Germans to the area, taking pressure off the French at Verdun. Given the wealth of British resources it could be argued the British should have done better, but that's a long way from saying the campaign failed, or that doing nothing or calling it off sooner would have been preferred.
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Do_I_Not_Like_That wrote: There is off course the lessons from the American Civil War, whch were either ignored or not known about...
True, but then consider the Americans turning up in WWI, and taking on board almost none of the hard won lessons of the European powers. Resulting in the Americans going through their own very steep learning curve.
I think we just don't do a very good job of learning from other people's experiences. We dismiss their experience, because they have this problem, or because we have this special thing. And then oh god its happening to us just like it happened to them who could possibly have seen this coming.
I expect the common perception is down to the fact that it's a lot easier to get away with justifications like "they had to learn" when "learning by doing" doesn't require you to feed (other) human beings into an industrial scale meatgrinder by the thousand.
British popular perception of the war centres around the Western Front trench warfare. It has been deeply conditioned by Allan Clarke's The Donkeys, by Oh What a Lovely War, and by Blackadder Goes Forth, all of which depict the plucky Tommy led by useless champagne Charlies into pointless, unsuccessful slaughter.
We like to lament the Gallipoli campaign too, which of course bogged down into static trench warfare and produced disproportionate casualties for the very meagre gains.
We tend to ignore the Imperial engagements in Mesopotamia, which were highly mobile and successful.
It’s true that the Schlieffen Plan produced a fast moving campaign in 1914, but it was an operational and strategic failure. Plus, incidents like the “Kindermord” battle showed that the casualty rate went up rapidly in the wrong circumstances.
There was of course a lot of mobile warfare on the Eastern Front.
There was significant mobile warfare in 1918 with the last German offensive and the final push of the Allies into Germany.
My point about the Russo-Japanese war was that the Japanese were successful in assaulting Russian entrenchments, despite high casualties, getting decisive results, and no-one found a different way to do it. (Until tanks and infiltration tactics.)
However, the same tactics did not produce decisive results in Western Front warfare because the sheer size and depth of the defensive lines made it impossible for the attackers, because they outran the supply and communications technology available to them.
It’s worth noting that tanks were only a valid frontal assault weapon until the development of good anti-tank weapons and tactics, after which they became as vulnerable in their way as the poor bloody infantry of WW1.
WW2 also brought a huge improvement in mobile communications, and great development of air support providing a new kind of roaming artillery.
To return to the original question, there were good generals and bad generals, and even the good generals had to operate within the situation they found themselves.
Yodhrin wrote: I expect the common perception is down to the fact that it's a lot easier to get away with justifications like "they had to learn" when "learning by doing" doesn't require you to feed (other) human beings into an industrial scale meatgrinder by the thousand.
Yodhrin wrote: I expect the common perception is down to the fact that it's a lot easier to get away with justifications like "they had to learn" when "learning by doing" doesn't require you to feed (other) human beings into an industrial scale meatgrinder by the thousand.
I think that's true up to a point. But when the core problems driving the stalemate still aren't understood by most people today, when people are free to read 100 years of hindsight analysis with no pressure of an on-going war. As such I'm willing to accept it was a complex problem that was hard to fully appreciate.
As an example, you'll hear people today complain that it was mad to send troops over the line when they could just use artillery to wipe out the enemy. But one of the big issues of the Somme is the British thought the stupendous barrage that kicked off the offensive would do massive damage to the German lines and open the way for the infantry, but in reality the impact of artillery drops off immensely after the opening few salvos.
It's not so much that it was okay to learn as you go. It's more that if people today, with the immense advantages of hingsight still don't get it, it might have been a tougher problem than most realise.
Yodhrin wrote: I expect the common perception is down to the fact that it's a lot easier to get away with justifications like "they had to learn" when "learning by doing" doesn't require you to feed (other) human beings into an industrial scale meatgrinder by the thousand.
I agree with the sentiment of this point, but it's always worth remembering that the generals didn't start the war - it was the politicians.
If you haven't read Christopher Clark's 'Sleepwalkers,' a book on how WW1 started, and I book I would recommend to anybody with an interest in the subject,
then you'll see that the outbreak of WW1 was one of the worst diplomatic blunders in human history.
Again, apologies for the spelling, but from Sleepwalkers I learned the following points:
Kaiser Wilhelm's most senior general and top military advisor was a paranoid sczhophrenic who hated the French... if he was looking for impartial advice, he'd come to the wrong place...
Sir Edward Grey, British Foreign Sec. decided to go on holiday for a few days at the height of the July crisis...
Russia decided to mobolise anyway, regardless of any diplomatic moves to stop a war.
France decided to back anything the Russians did...
Like I said, not exactly the finest hour for the political class...
Yodhrin wrote: I expect the common perception is down to the fact that it's a lot easier to get away with justifications like "they had to learn" when "learning by doing" doesn't require you to feed (other) human beings into an industrial scale meatgrinder by the thousand.
I think that's true up to a point. But when the core problems driving the stalemate still aren't understood by most people today, when people are free to read 100 years of hindsight analysis with no pressure of an on-going war. As such I'm willing to accept it was a complex problem that was hard to fully appreciate.
As an example, you'll hear people today complain that it was mad to send troops over the line when they could just use artillery to wipe out the enemy. But one of the big issues of the Somme is the British thought the stupendous barrage that kicked off the offensive would do massive damage to the German lines and open the way for the infantry, but in reality the impact of artillery drops off immensely after the opening few salvos.
It's not so much that it was okay to learn as you go. It's more that if people today, with the immense advantages of hingsight still don't get it, it might have been a tougher problem than most realise.
But not everybody bought the myth that it would be easy, or over by Christmas.
Kitchener, who became the British Secretary of State for War in 1914, caused a few voiced words of dissapproval to be raised when he told the cabinet in 1914, that the war would last for 3 years, and "plumb the depths of Britain's manpower to the last million."
I have a Kitchener biography, and he studied the lessons of the Russo-Japanese war, and of course, he himself had noted the large numbers of troops he had needed to defeat the Boers in the Boer war.
Kitchener had seen what modern Mauser rifles in the hands of the Boers had done to British troops in the conflcit.
So, yeah, there were one or two people who were totally realistic about the type of war WW1 would be. Sadly, their voices were not heeded.
Some, such as Cadorna or von Hotzenndorf, deserve their reputations.
Some, like Bing, do not deserve a reputation of being donkeys.
Some, like Haige, deserve something of a bad reputation on the basis of doing the same thing after it was proved not to work the first time, but not as bad as they get because no-one really had a better idea.
Crazy_Carnifex wrote: Some, such as Cadorna or von Hotzenndorf, deserve their reputations.
Some, like Bing, do not deserve a reputation of being donkeys.
Some, like Haige, deserve something of a bad reputation on the basis of doing the same thing after it was proved not to work the first time, but not as bad as they get because no-one really had a better idea.
Your fellow countrymen, under the able and gifted leadership of Arthur Curry, seemed to have adapted very quickly to trenchwarfare, and indeed, helped to pioneer early combined arms tactics.
Add Monash and the Australians to that lsit as well. So, if they could do it, why not everybody else?
Even the Germans took at least 3 years to develop Stormtrooper tactics...
Yodhrin wrote: I expect the common perception is down to the fact that it's a lot easier to get away with justifications like "they had to learn" when "learning by doing" doesn't require you to feed (other) human beings into an industrial scale meatgrinder by the thousand.
I think that's true up to a point. But when the core problems driving the stalemate still aren't understood by most people today, when people are free to read 100 years of hindsight analysis with no pressure of an on-going war. As such I'm willing to accept it was a complex problem that was hard to fully appreciate.
As an example, you'll hear people today complain that it was mad to send troops over the line when they could just use artillery to wipe out the enemy. But one of the big issues of the Somme is the British thought the stupendous barrage that kicked off the offensive would do massive damage to the German lines and open the way for the infantry, but in reality the impact of artillery drops off immensely after the opening few salvos.
It's not so much that it was okay to learn as you go. It's more that if people today, with the immense advantages of hingsight still don't get it, it might have been a tougher problem than most realise.
No it was made to keep sending them over the side. period. The entire period of 1915 - 1917 was mad on both sides. Its the fault of the generals. Its the fault of the politicians and kings.
Do_I_Not_Like_That wrote: But not everybody bought the myth that it would be easy, or over by Christmas.
That's not my point. What I'm saying, basically, is that when people today still don't understand the causes of stalemate, then I'm inclined to give some leeway to the generals of the time that it was a complex problem and one that was actually quite hard to solve.
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Frazzled wrote: No it was made to keep sending them over the side. period.
This was just discussed. The idea that troops were sent in to pointless, mass slaughter is a myth. Most assaults reached the enemy trenches, more than a third of assaults actually achieved their first wave objectives. Nor was either side working on the myth of a huge breakthrough after the early stages of the war. Verdun was started by the Germans as an attritional offensive, to 'bleed France white'. The Germans thought Verdun was a position the French couldn't abandon, but would have to defend at a strategic disadvantage. But despite some amazing early successes the Germans failed to capture all the ground they needed to dominate the position, and combined with France building a strong supply line meant in the end French and German casualties were roughly equal.
The British and French responded with the Somme, which despite talk of being a hammer blow on the Germans, was in fact designed to relieve pressure at Verdun and place attritional pressure on Germany. Despite some early disasters it succeeded in these goals.
So no, this idea that troops were just being sent blindly in to slaughter was nonsense. This doesn't mean doctrines were as good as could be, far from it, but it does mean things were a lot more complex than the popular myth you're repeating here.
Russia decided to mobolise anyway, regardless of any diplomatic moves to stop a war.
Russia really had no choice but to begin mobilisation. If they didn't mobilise prior to the war beginning, they would have been left in a terrible position should the Germans attack, due to the difficulties in transporting large numbers of men and material in Tsarist Russia.
Extra History did what I thought was a great series of videos examining the causes of the war.
EDIT: They also did a series on Bismark which I think you'd enjoy, DINLT. You probably know it all already from your reading but they still make it fun with their phrasing and comic images
WW1 was the fault of Germany giving Austria a blank cheque in support of the Austrian aggression towards Serbia.
Russia had to support Serbia. The Austrians didn't dare attack Serbia without German support against the intervention of Russia.
QED.
Once mobilisation was triggered in a nation, the huge volume and complexity of intricately planned movements of troops, trains and equipment was impossible to halt without throwing everything into chaos.
sebster wrote: I think more than that, though, the war has come to defined by this idea of futile trench assaults across no man's land. It's not actually true.... So most initially successful assaults were generally defeated by a quicker reacting counter-offensive.
I'd argue a trench assault that is immediately lost to a counter offensive would be a pretty futile one.
Kilkrazy wrote: WW1 was the fault of Germany giving Austria a blank cheque in support of the Austrian aggression towards Serbia.
Russia had to support Serbia. The Austrians didn't dare attack Serbia without German support against the intervention of Russia.
QED.
Once mobilisation was triggered in a nation, the huge volume and complexity of intricately planned movements of troops, trains and equipment was impossible to halt without throwing everything into chaos.
This is all true, but let's not forget that it was Serbian terrorists, with links to the Serbian government, that murdered the heir to the Austrian-Hungarian throne...
Britain, France, Germany would all have reacted the same as Austria.
Imagine the British reaction if Prince Edward had been murdered by foreign terrorists backed by their state government...
Russia decided to mobolise anyway, regardless of any diplomatic moves to stop a war.
Russia really had no choice but to begin mobilisation. If they didn't mobilise prior to the war beginning, they would have been left in a terrible position should the Germans attack, due to the difficulties in transporting large numbers of men and material in Tsarist Russia.
Extra History did what I thought was a great series of videos examining the causes of the war.
EDIT: They also did a series on Bismark which I think you'd enjoy, DINLT. You probably know it all already from your reading but they still make it fun with their phrasing and comic images
Kilkrazy wrote: WW1 was the fault of Germany giving Austria a blank cheque in support of the Austrian aggression towards Serbia.
Russia had to support Serbia. The Austrians didn't dare attack Serbia without German support against the intervention of Russia.
QED.
Once mobilisation was triggered in a nation, the huge volume and complexity of intricately planned movements of troops, trains and equipment was impossible to halt without throwing everything into chaos.
This is all true, but let's not forget that it was Serbian terrorists, with links to the Serbian government, that murdered the heir to the Austrian-Hungarian throne...
Britain, France, Germany would all have reacted the same as Austria.
Imagine the British reaction if Prince Edward had been murdered by foreign terrorists backed by their state government...
Russia decided to mobolise anyway, regardless of any diplomatic moves to stop a war.
Russia really had no choice but to begin mobilisation. If they didn't mobilise prior to the war beginning, they would have been left in a terrible position should the Germans attack, due to the difficulties in transporting large numbers of men and material in Tsarist Russia.
Extra History did what I thought was a great series of videos examining the causes of the war.
EDIT: They also did a series on Bismark which I think you'd enjoy, DINLT. You probably know it all already from your reading but they still make it fun with their phrasing and comic images
I shall add it to the watch list. Thank you
That's just your claim, and anyway it's irrelevant because the point is that it was Germany unconditional 100% support for whatever Austria wanted to do that led to the war.
That's just your claim, and anyway it's irrelevant because the point is that it was Germany unconditional 100% support for whatever Austria wanted to do that led to the war.
But it wasn't. Austria-Hungary vs Serbia would have been one of the countless minor wars the Balkans have seen over the centuries if Russia had not decided to unconditionally support Serbia, and if France and Britain had not decided to support Russia. When people fight, the blame for the fight is virtually always shared between them. Nobody was forcing Russia, France or Britain to go to war. They went to war because that is what they wanted. Therefore, WW1 is as much their fault as Germany's. Germany wasn't trying to bring about a Europe-wide war. They would likely never have given Austria a carte blanche if they had known that Russia would actually go to war with them over the issue. And Russia would never have gone to war with Austria-Hungary and Germany if they had not been assured of the support of France and Britain. And of course nothing of this all would have ever happened if Serbia hadn't supported the assassins, which they would have never done if they had not been assured of Russian support in case of war, or if Austria-Hungary had not been so set on invading Serbia. Germany's support for Austria was just one decision in the long chain of events and decisions that led to the war. It was not the decisive decision that started it. Really, if you want to blame anyone for the war, blame those who fired the first shots: The Austrians, the Hungarians, and the Serbs. It was their decision to pull the trigger that ultimately started the war.
That's just your claim, and anyway it's irrelevant because the point is that it was Germany unconditional 100% support for whatever Austria wanted to do that led to the war.
But it wasn't. Austria-Hungary vs Serbia would have been one of the countless minor wars the Balkans have seen over the centuries if Russia had not decided to unconditionally support Serbia, and if France and Britain had not decided to support Russia. When people fight, the blame for the fight is virtually always shared between them. Nobody was forcing Russia, France or Britain to go to war. They went to war because that is what they wanted. Therefore, WW1 is as much their fault as Germany's. Germany wasn't trying to bring about a Europe-wide war. They would likely never have given Austria a carte blanche if they had known that Russia would actually go to war with them over the issue. And Russia would never have gone to war with Austria-Hungary and Germany if they had not been assured of the support of France and Britain. And of course nothing of this all would have ever happened if Serbia hadn't supported the assassins, which they would have never done if they had not been assured of Russian support in case of war, or if Austria-Hungary had not been so set on invading Serbia. Germany's support for Austria was just one decision in the long chain of events and decisions that led to the war. It was not the decisive decision that started it.
Really, if you want to blame anyone for the war, blame those who fired the first shots: The Austrians, the Hungarians, and the Serbs. It was their decision to pull the trigger that ultimately started the war.
A good post, but technically, is the Arch-Duke not to blame?
I remember an article once that talks about how he survived the first assassination attempt, but then foolishly decided to keep going with his official visit.
His driver then took the wrong turn, and drove up the street where the gunman was...
And the rest is 4 years of death, Communism, Versailles, Nazism, WW2...
Funny how history turns on such smal margins...
But back OT.
Russia had a capable general in Brusilov, who's 1916 offensive nearly knocked the Austrians out of the war.
From what I can tell, the rest of the Russian generals were a hopeless bunch - the Czar's relatives or overpromoted cronies.
What's your Russian view of Russian generals in WW1? I can imagine they are overshadow by WW2 Russian generals - Zhukov and all that...
When people fight, the blame for the fight is virtually always shared between them. Nobody was forcing Russia, France or Britain to go to war. They went to war because that is what they wanted. Therefore, WW1 is as much their fault as Germany's.
No. In a word. That's like saying that if two blokes assault your friend next to you, you're as much to blame for starting the resulting punch-up by weighing in next to them. Germany spent the better part of the prior decade trying to scare and bully people into appeasing it (or to carry on with the above analogy, shouting threatening insults, cracking knuckles and waving broken bottles). They were determined to have their 'place in the Sun' from which they could dominate Europe. Germany declared war next to Austria Hungary very deliberately with those gains in mind.
You could ostensibly say that Russia was much to blame for the Austria-Hungary/Serbian situation as the other lot were, and there'd be some merit to it. But Germany's decision to escalate it eastwards and go for Russia was entirely their own. Their subsequent decision to then make unreasonable demands of France and declare war on them almost immediately afterwards was also entirely their fault. France really had little choice in the matter, Germany went for them virtually before they had time to put together a reply. That then placed Britain in a very uncomfortable position. The British proposed a peace conference, and were rebuffed. Even then, the British tried to stay out of it and said that if Belgium was left alone, they'd remain uninvolved.
But then Germany went through Belgium. And the rest is, as they say, history. Germany was very, very much to blame for the First 'World' War. Sure, Russia and Austria-Hungary have some blame for their own argy bargy; but Germany's decisions alone effectively forced themselves, the British and the French into the field. Which then ended up bringing in the Americans, the Turks, the Japanese, the Italians, and people from all around the world. Germany personally took it from 'Balkans Annual Scrap #123' to "World War" and consequently shoulder the blame for that development. Nobody else.
Couldn't have put it better myself. Germany's support for Austria-Hungary was the factor that enabled a war between major powers (if anything, Russia mobilising made war less likely, as without German backing, they were enough of a threat to AH that the latter would have to back down). In that regard, Germany (and if you really want to be specific, Bethmann-Hollweg) has to take the largest portion of blame for the conflict escalating beyond a regional scrap. Throw in Moltke's obsession with smashing the French just like his uncle had (the one that was actually a good planner and commander!) and it's hard not to blame Germany.
The Kaiser can perhaps come off a little better, as his fault is really apathy rather than malice. Going on holiday at the height of a global crisis is undeniable an incredibly dumb thing for a head of state to do, but there's plenty of evidence to suggest the war was not something he actively sought or enabled, unlike the two aforementioned individuals.
Back to the Generals question, it's interesting how the poll appears to be weighted very heavily towards 'yes' but the answers in the thread are mostly 'no'.
No. In a word. That's like saying that if two blokes assault your friend next to you, you're as much to blame for starting the resulting punch-up by weighing in next to them. Germany spent the better part of the prior decade trying to scare and bully people into appeasing it (or to carry on with the above analogy, shouting threatening insults, cracking knuckles and waving broken bottles). They were determined to have their 'place in the Sun' from which they could dominate Europe. Germany declared war next to Austria Hungary very deliberately with those gains in mind.
The French were far from innocent either. They'd been lusting after a war with Germany since 1870. 'Remember alsas and Lorraine' was their war cry.
And to be fair to your analogy, your mate was happy for the fight too, and was hurling his own abuse. And if it ends up with everyone battered and bloodied, and the police, or neutral bystanders come along, your mate is as much guilty for causing the fracas in their eyes as the original two. After all, he could have walked away and ignored them. Instead he got involved and Escalated it.
Please lets not go down the road where you are justfying the sham that Was Versailles and it's whole purpose of 'screw Germany, and let's wash our hands of all the blame'.
That's just your claim, and anyway it's irrelevant because the point is that it was Germany unconditional 100% support for whatever Austria wanted to do that led to the war.
But it wasn't. Austria-Hungary vs Serbia would have been one of the countless minor wars the Balkans have seen over the centuries if Russia had not decided to unconditionally support Serbia, and if France and Britain had not decided to support Russia. ...
If Germany had not unconditionally supported Austria, they woudl not have dared to invade Serbia and WW1 would not have happened. The rest of the nations were sucked into the conflict by the German action.
What's your Russian view of Russian generals in WW1? I can imagine they are overshadow by WW2 Russian generals - Zhukov and all that...
In short, most Russian generals of the 20th century Russian Empire were very incompetent, reaching their positions only because they were nobility, not because they had skill or proper education. Some of these generals were competent but not really exceptional and only one of them, Brusilov, was really notable.
Brusilov was great. The others are barely remembered. Not just because of their horrible performance in the war against Germany and Austria-Hungary, but also because they chose the wrong side in the Civil War. Brusilov sided with the reds. Most of the others sided with the whites. It is not that there weren't any good Russian generals besides Brusilov, but the Soviets obviously never made an effort to remember the positive things about their enemies. So that is why only the big hero (Brusilov), the grossly incompetent (such as Samsonov and Von Rennenkampf) or the ones that played a notable role in the civil war (such as Alekseev, Yudenich or Kornilov) are somewhat remembered while other moderately competent generals (such as Ivanov or Selivanov) are pretty much entirely forgotten. You are very right in saying that they were overshadowed, mostly by their opponents in the Civil War, such as Trotsky, Budyonny, and Tukhachevsky and by the huge shadow of the Great Patriotic War, so even Brusilov isn't really well known. Probably the most notable military leader of that whole period is Chapaev. And that is only because we love telling jokes about him.
That's just your claim, and anyway it's irrelevant because the point is that it was Germany unconditional 100% support for whatever Austria wanted to do that led to the war.
But it wasn't. Austria-Hungary vs Serbia would have been one of the countless minor wars the Balkans have seen over the centuries if Russia had not decided to unconditionally support Serbia, and if France and Britain had not decided to support Russia. ...
If Germany had not unconditionally supported Austria, they woudl not have dared to invade Serbia and WW1 would not have happened. The rest of the nations were sucked into the conflict by the German action.
If Russia had not unconditionally supported Serbia, they would not have dared to challenge Austria and WW1 would not have happened. The rest of the nations were sucked into the conflict by the Russian action. If France had not unconditionally supported Russia, they would not have dared to mobilise against Germany and Austria and WW1 would not have happened. The rest of the nations were sucked into the conflict by the French action.
You need to explain why Germany supporting its allies led to war while other countries doing exactly the same thing did not. WW1 happened because of the web of alliances. The Russians, British, French and Serbs were equally guilty of making alliances as were the Germans and Austro-Hungarians.
The French were far from innocent either. They'd been lusting after a war with Germany since 1870. 'Remember alsas and Lorraine' was their war cry.
No. To repeat the word. Factually, no.
There were certainly some hotheads looking to right the wrong of the Franco-Prusso war on both sides, but few people seriously worked that into their calculations. You have to remember; that particular war happened in 1870. The First World War was in 1914. Life expectancy in those days was not particularly impressive for the masses. There were not a vast number of people old enough to remember the first war, let alone resent the outcome. By 1913, it was a bit like how the whole Gibraltar thing is perceived today in Spain; the politicians wheel it out to rabblerouse and try to distract people with at awkward moments, but it has little serious pull on national emotion.
Furthermore, there had been multiple war scares across Europe in that timespan. You have to remember, the alliance system wasn't dreamed up overnight. There was no reason that 1914 specifically had to be the year for mass escalation, any more than 1888 had to have been, or 1927. There was no inevitability about World War One; despite common portrayals. The alliance system was far from solid on all sides. Christ, when the possibility was first mooted in 1912 of the British Army supporting the French, all bar two members of the Cabinet were against it.
And to be fair to your analogy, your mate was happy for the fight too, and was hurling his own abuse. And if it ends up with everyone battered and bloodied, and the police, or neutral bystanders come along, your mate is as much guilty for causing the fracas in their eyes as the original two. After all, he could have walked away and ignored them. Instead he got involved and Escalated it.
Given the British attempts to arrange a peace conference, lack of firm commitment to the Entente, and the French doubt over whether or not to support Russia, this is patently, factually, demonstrably untrue.
Please lets not go down the road where you are justfying the sham that Was Versailles and it's whole purpose of 'screw Germany, and let's wash our hands of all the blame'.
Versailles has nothing to do with it. If we're considering the causes of a 'World' war (note the very careful articulation of the word 'world), Germany was the prime instigator of massive escalation from virtually every direction. Austria Hungary vs Russia at that point would have been a cripple fight. Germany very consciously took actions which they knew would draw in both France and most likely Britain.
You need to explain why Germany supporting its allies led to war while other countries doing exactly the same thing did not. WW1 happened because of the web of alliances.
This is essentially where your understanding of it is flawed. I don't blame you for that, most countries teach this subject in a 'He declared war, so she declared war, so he declared war' style. Keeps it simplistic. But in reality, the alliance system set the board, but did not move the pieces.
Russia and Austria-Hungary both deserve blame as the primary instigators. Germany deserves blame for jumping in headfirst because they saw it as a way of attaining political goals. France though? France entered the war because Germany left them no choice but to do so. They were presented with terms by Germany which were completely unacceptable if they wanted to stay neutral. Britain meanwhile, actively decided they would not join the war if Belgium wasn't violated, France and Russia be damned.
In other words, the alliances really were not the reason France/Britain joined in.
I would argue, the breakdown of natural alliances between Britain and Austria against allowing Russian access to the Mediterranean is what led to the war. Austria could no longer count on British support and was forced to ally with Germany as the only other nation opposed to Russian aggression.
Do WW1 generals deserve their bad reputation? Hard to say. I forget the exact name of the battle, but whichever one it was proved that with proper, detailed reconnaissance and rehearsal, it was possible to win at trench warfare. But it required everything going 100% to plan. If anything went wrong, or circumstances changed, they were unable to react quickly enough to deal with it. When your communication network was as bad as it was back then it really is hard to properly conduct a war on that scale. Pigeons and telephones don't really compare to a radio.
What's your Russian view of Russian generals in WW1? I can imagine they are overshadow by WW2 Russian generals - Zhukov and all that...
In short, most Russian generals of the 20th century Russian Empire were very incompetent, reaching their positions only because they were nobility, not because they had skill or proper education. Some of these generals were competent but not really exceptional and only one of them, Brusilov, was really notable.
Brusilov was great. The others are barely remembered. Not just because of their horrible performance in the war against Germany and Austria-Hungary, but also because they chose the wrong side in the Civil War. Brusilov sided with the reds. Most of the others sided with the whites. It is not that there weren't any good Russian generals besides Brusilov, but the Soviets obviously never made an effort to remember the positive things about their enemies. So that is why only the big hero (Brusilov), the grossly incompetent (such as Samsonov and Von Rennenkampf) or the ones that played a notable role in the civil war (such as Alekseev, Yudenich or Kornilov) are somewhat remembered while other moderately competent generals (such as Ivanov or Selivanov) are pretty much entirely forgotten. You are very right in saying that they were overshadowed, mostly by their opponents in the Civil War, such as Trotsky, Budyonny, and Tukhachevsky and by the huge shadow of the Great Patriotic War, so even Brusilov isn't really well known. Probably the most notable military leader of that whole period is Chapaev. And that is only because we love telling jokes about him.
That's just your claim, and anyway it's irrelevant because the point is that it was Germany unconditional 100% support for whatever Austria wanted to do that led to the war.
But it wasn't. Austria-Hungary vs Serbia would have been one of the countless minor wars the Balkans have seen over the centuries if Russia had not decided to unconditionally support Serbia, and if France and Britain had not decided to support Russia. ...
If Germany had not unconditionally supported Austria, they woudl not have dared to invade Serbia and WW1 would not have happened. The rest of the nations were sucked into the conflict by the German action.
If Russia had not unconditionally supported Serbia, they would not have dared to challenge Austria and WW1 would not have happened. The rest of the nations were sucked into the conflict by the Russian action.
If France had not unconditionally supported Russia, they would not have dared to mobilise against Germany and Austria and WW1 would not have happened. The rest of the nations were sucked into the conflict by the French action.
You need to explain why Germany supporting its allies led to war while other countries doing exactly the same thing did not. WW1 happened because of the web of alliances. The Russians, British, French and Serbs were equally guilty of making alliances as were the Germans and Austro-Hungarians.
I dont think its fair to call either Rennenkampf (who did save his army) and Samsonov "incompetent". A lot of things happened that was not under their control and to be fair, they were not nearly as well supplied with essentials as their opponents (Samsonov did not even have a copy of the code book) adding insult to injury stavka had to send orders over the open. the deck was certainly stacked against them.
I also think its way too easy for people to forget the conditions that WW1 was fought under, we have had decades to second guess these guys, but they had to go with what they had at the time and what they knew and were trained to do. It was a new and horrible style of war in a changing world.
I also think its way too easy for people to forget the conditions that WW1 was fought under, we have had decades to second guess these guys, but they had to go with what they had at the time and what they knew and were trained to do. It was a new and horrible style of war in a changing world.
I definitely agree with this point. . . Even those who weren't versed in Napoleonic tactics (many American commanders were blooded fighting in various campaigns in the SW, or the Philippine Insurrection and the like) were trained/experienced in things which would have little to no bearing on the conduct of WW1.
AllSeeingSkink wrote: I'd argue a trench assault that is immediately lost to a counter offensive would be a pretty futile one.
Missing the point, though. First up, high command on all sides engaged in the Western Front realised it was an attritional war. Verdun was started not to capture area, but to force the French in to losing many more troops stabilising the area than the Germans lost in threatening it. The Somme was begun for much the same reason, to draw German forces from Verdun, and to cost Germany troops it couldn't replace. If the actual fighting meant launching an offensive and then losing that ground in a counter offensive, that still met the strategic objectives if the result got enough enemy troops killed.
Second up, the point is that while infiltration tactics, combined arms, orders of operation, wide over deep penetrations etc took time to develop as effective strategies, the reasons the war bogged down are way more complex than 'machine guns make offensives futile', which is the common understanding. And so, given that today people have the benefit of 100 years of learning to come to appreciate the real reasons and most people still haven't wrapped their heads around it... I'm inclined to give the generals of the time the benefit of the doubt, because they were working in real time, trying to understand the situation as it unfolded.
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Future War Cultist wrote: Do WW1 generals deserve their bad reputation? Hard to say. I forget the exact name of the battle, but whichever one it was proved that with proper, detailed reconnaissance and rehearsal, it was possible to win at trench warfare. But it required everything going 100% to plan. If anything went wrong, or circumstances changed, they were unable to react quickly enough to deal with it. When your communication network was as bad as it was back then it really is hard to properly conduct a war on that scale. Pigeons and telephones don't really compare to a radio.
It was always possible to succeed in an offensive. Every nation did it on small scale fairly often, and by the end of the war they all managed it in larger scales. The problem was it was translating those tactical and operational successes in to strategic gains.
TheMeanDM wrote: I never understood the WW I tactic of throwing millions of men headlong directly at each others trench.
FFS invade somewhere there wasn't a trench to hurtle into...
Take a port city and stage a mainland invasion...
Invade from a connected country (you mean, like the Germans did?!?)
I just never got it. As Sun Tzu said:
* If your enemy is secure at all points, be prepared for him. If he is in superior strength, evade him.
* So in war, the way is to avoid what is strong, and strike at what is weak.
It's a lot more complicated than that!
I've been doing further reading on it, and the Canadians are a good example, because they were very very good at this.
So, before dawn, as quietly as possible, troops creep out as close as possible to the enemy.
Your barrage starts shelling the German trenches for a set time.
Whilst this is happening, you advance forward, as close as you dare to your own barrage
And then the fighting starts...
The Canadians were very quick to use Lewis guns as portable LMGs for suppressing the enemy, they also hit upon the novel idea of zig-zagging, and moving from cover to cover. This was not orthodox at the time, and they used portable mortars for tough targets like machine guns built into pill boxes or similar concrete structures...
Tanks obviously helped as well.
However, as it's been pointed out by others, storming the trenches was not the problem - it's fighting off the counter-attacks. The enemy could quickly bring up reserves, so you need artillery to break this up. As the war developed, the British became very good at this, but it was a hard learning curve.
The Hindenburg Line was a fiendish and evil defence system with its own challenges for the attacker to overcome - battle zones, support trenches, and just a thin screen in front to funnel attackers into a killing zone...
But they eventually smashed through it.
These were hard won lessons, with a lot of trial and error. Most commanders knew the futility of troops walking towards machine-guns, but it took a long time for new tech and tactics to catch up.
And on a strategic level, you have to consider that by mid-1915 at the latest, there was basically an unbroken front line across the whole of central Europe. Attempts to open up other fronts were made, Galipolli being the most notable, but they largely failed. It wasn't a case of 'attacking somewhere that there weren't trenches', because that defensive network quite literally divided the continent. Anywhere the fighting occurred, the belligerents were thoroughly dug in because that was the only reliable way to hold ground against a modern offensive.
And as for port cities, it's quite hard to launch a naval invasion of Germany, what with it being landlocked and all...
TheMeanDM wrote: I never understood the WW I tactic of throwing millions of men headlong directly at each others trench.
FFS invade somewhere there wasn't a trench to hurtle into...
Take a port city and stage a mainland invasion...
The idea you are suggesting was actually mooted many times (primarily by the Navy). Suffice to say it was ruled out just as many times for very many reasons too long to be enumerated here.
Paradigm wrote: And as for port cities, it's quite hard to launch a naval invasion of Germany, what with it being landlocked and all...
Germany is not landlocked...and wasn't during WW 1. It is accessed by the North Sea and Baltic Sea.
But for all practical intents and purposes no one had the gear and ships to pull it off. The Russian Baltic navy wasn't up to anything such, and the stronger UK navy would have had to get through the German navy at great cost. Plus the German submarines would have had a field day with the passenger ships pressed into service as troop carriers.
Short answer: YES, but it didnt apply to all of them.
Not every general sat in a mansion living it up while he sent tens of thousands to their deaths for nothing, but Haig did and that was enough.
Haig also sacked any general who disagreed with his methods, this resulted in the one or two good things he did by accident, such as shipping Allenby off to a sideshow action in Palestine where he could perform.
Haig didn't operate in a vacuum, the civil service was behind him, as was the King, and this prevented Lloyd George from replacing him.
It wasn't just the British generals who were incompetent though, nearly all the belligerent powers with notable exception of the United States suffered same. The Americans watched and learned, and the army they shipped to France in 1917 was probably the finest the US has ever had.
Paradigm wrote: And as for port cities, it's quite hard to launch a naval invasion of Germany, what with it being landlocked and all...
Germany is not landlocked...and wasn't during WW 1. It is accessed by the North Sea and Baltic Sea.
But for all practical intents and purposes no one had the gear and ships to pull it off. The Russian Baltic navy wasn't up to anything such, and the stronger UK navy would have had to get through the German navy at great cost. Plus the German submarines would have had a field day with the passenger ships pressed into service as troop carriers.
The problems with a close blockade were many, but there wasn't much doubt that forces could be protected whilst landing (assuming you literally weren't trying to land under the guns of Wilhelmshaven). It was ruled out more due to the overwhelming superiority of German Army numbers vs the BEF in the earlier years; combined with the belief that it would simply drain troops from the main front, be a bloody nightmare to resupply, and just trap them into supporting a small easily shelled pocket that would just end up having another trench network dug around it. Had the Dardanelles been sucessfully forced we might have gotten somewhere; but that failure was really the point at which the second front died as a possibility (though they didn't know it at the time).
TheMeanDM wrote: I never understood the WW I tactic of throwing millions of men headlong directly at each others trench.
FFS invade somewhere there wasn't a trench to hurtle into...
Take a port city and stage a mainland invasion...
Invade from a connected country (you mean, like the Germans did?!?)
I just never got it. As Sun Tzu said:
* If your enemy is secure at all points, be prepared for him. If he is in superior strength, evade him.
* So in war, the way is to avoid what is strong, and strike at what is weak.
Well the basic idea is that you can overwhelm the enemy defenses with sheer numbers and pour through the gap before he can bring up reserves to stop you. It is a solid idea because when defending a huge trench line, your troops are by necessity spread out relatively thinly. You're entirely reliant on having enough machine guns to push back far greater numbers of the enemy. And if its not enough you are hosed. Your only safety net is reserve forces kept behind the lines to react to any breakthroughs.
As for striking at the enemy's weak points. That was not quite possible.
Trench lines literally stretched from the Alps all the way to the sea. Crossing the alps with an army would have meant invading neutral countries or somehow securing passage through them, which they would not have agreed to.
This only left invading from the sea. Which would have been even more costly as it would have forced a confrontation between the Royal and German navies. The Royal Navy would have most likely won, but at the same time they would have lost a lot of ships and men just attempting a landing. In the days before you had specialized landing craft and when the enemy will still likely be opposing the landing. It might have worked, but it would just as likely have resulted in another front of trench warfare. While simultaneously severely weakening the Royal navy, Britan's main source of international power projection.
It's relatively easy to through up a quick trench line to stop an enemy advance, and that buys you time to keep adding layers and depth onto the trench so you can get really dug in. And by the time the enemy has brought up artillery you will have brought up yours too. And you've just made yet another trench front.
The entire line was well defended....and yet they kept sending their men to the slaughter because, in my opinion, thry hadn't progressed mucy beyond the "march into battle in formation and get shot at for honor" kind of mentality that the Napoleonic, Franco Prussian, etc. wars were fought like.
Don't get me wrong...I know that in some cases you need to throw bodies in overwhelming numbers in order to secure an objective....but WWI was really the worst kind of war that they cpuld habe tried to do that with.
The entire line was well defended....and yet they kept sending their men to the slaughter because, in my opinion, thry hadn't progressed mucy beyond the "march into battle in formation and get shot at for honor" kind of mentality that the Napoleonic, Franco Prussian, etc. wars were fought like.
Then with all due respect, your opinion is ill founded and utterly incorrect.
Seriously. Go and pick up a book on the pre-war British Army/Navy and strategic planning.
However, as it's been pointed out by others, storming the trenches was not the problem - it's fighting off the counter-attacks. The enemy could quickly bring up reserves, so you need artillery to break this up. As the war developed, the British became very good at this, but it was a hard learning curve.
Wasn't the counter attack defense "helped" when us Yanks started "cheating" in our warfare by using shotguns in the trenches??
They failed to learn from the various German Unification wars + the Franco-Prussain War and the American Civil War. The ineffectiveness of attacking dug in infantry, supported by Artillery elements without sufficient support was already a known factor. The fatality rates from some of those conflicts are truly horrifying in themselves. The only difference is the rapid manner both sides were able to mobilise in WW1 removed any chance of it remaining a war of maneuver past the first few months on the Western Front.
However, as it's been pointed out by others, storming the trenches was not the problem - it's fighting off the counter-attacks. The enemy could quickly bring up reserves, so you need artillery to break this up. As the war developed, the British became very good at this, but it was a hard learning curve.
Wasn't the counter attack defense "helped" when us Yanks started "cheating" in our warfare by using shotguns in the trenches??
No.
When I say counter-attacks, I literally mean division sized counter-attacks. 10,000 men +
For example, the British gains at Cambrai on the first day put a boot up the German rear, but then the Germans counter-attacked with 3-4 divisions
Unless that shotgun has the fire power of the deathstar, it can only do so much!
On a serious note, the shotgun was excellent for storming trenches, close quarters, night time trench raids etc etc
But the best way to stop a counter-attack was machine guns, organised defence, and of course, artillery.
By 1918, the British had it perfected:
scout planes to spy on German reinforcements massing. Supply tanks to trundle up and drop off badly needed ammo for the defenders. Better comms between the front-line and HQ. And of course, more artillery in reserve to launch another bombardment. The guys who fired the prep bombardment would be fatigued and out of ammo by the time they finished, so fresh guns with fresh gunners and plentiful ammo was the obvious common sense thing to do. By that stage of the war, British war production was cranking out the guns and shells.
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Optio wrote: They failed to learn from the various German Unification wars + the Franco-Prussain War and the American Civil War. The ineffectiveness of attacking dug in infantry, supported by Artillery elements without sufficient support was already a known factor. The fatality rates from some of those conflicts are truly horrifying in themselves. The only difference is the rapid manner both sides were able to mobilise in WW1 removed any chance of it remaining a war of maneuver past the first few months on the Western Front.
True, but bear in mind that poison gas was supposed to be the solution for solving the problem of dug in infantry.
Somebody correct me if I'm wrong, but the Germans developed some particularly nasty poison gas
Blue cross? was small enough to by- pass gas mask filters, and it made you cough = take off gas mask
and that was fired alongside yellow cross? or mustard gas to get you when you had panicked and taken off your gas mask...
Very nasty stuff, but it was believed to be a solution to dug in troops.
The Germans also had flame-throwers as well. In short, they had tech that nobody had in the American Civil War, so believed they could solve the problem of dug in infantry.
Anecdotal story. When my father first started working as a young apprentice after WW2, some of the old-timers at his factory, who were WW1 vets, had suffered gas attacks in the trenches.
The lenses in their glasses were as thick as milk bottles...
Even after the terrible slaughter of the recently finished Second World War, people were still suffering the effects of the First world war
Everybody had developed various types of nasty gases.
Ironically, that was the one weapon Hitler was utterly reluctant to use as an offensive weapon as he had been a victim of it during WW1, even though it would have helped Germany a lot had they used it.
The entire line was well defended....and yet they kept sending their men to the slaughter because, in my opinion, thry hadn't progressed mucy beyond the "march into battle in formation and get shot at for honor" kind of mentality that the Napoleonic, Franco Prussian, etc. wars were fought like.
Then with all due respect, your opinion is ill founded and utterly incorrect.
Seriously. Go and pick up a book on the pre-war British Army/Navy and strategic planning.
Whenever someone says "With all due respect" they really have none...so just save the stupid empty platitude and man up to simply say "I think you are wrong and here is why".
While not as up on my WWI history, it still doesn't take away from the fact that they *did* fight some of WWI with the same mentality and approach they did prior wars in the prior century.
"The Armies that marched off to war and clashed in August 1914 operated on essentially 19th century doctrines, large units of riflemen were screened by cavalry and supported by artillery."
Whenever someone says "With all due respect" they really have none...so just save the stupid empty platitude and man up to simply say "I think you are wrong and here is why".
Okay. You are wrong. You are a random commentator in the twenty first century with absolutely no knowledge whatsoever of the matter, or you wouldn't be making the pronouncements you are.
I highly recommend you pick up a book or two before making grandiose statements about how the British Army maintained Napoleonic mentalities; and research things like the Cardwell reforms, the Haldane reforms, the Committee appointed to learn from the Boer War, the Imperial Defence Planning Committee, and a vast multitude of various other such details before doing so again. Seriously.
I'm not saying these things to be nasty, in fact, I positively encourage interest and learning about this period. But as people have said earlier in the thread, there were many of the greatest military and scientific minds bent to trying to break the deadlock in WW1. It's somewhat presumptuous to assume that their problems could have been involved with amateur strategic insight/solutions on the level granted by a Total War game.
For a basic introductory course in the British Army pre-war, I'd recommend:-
Edward Spiers, 'The Army and Society 1815-1914' (Longman Group, 1980)
John Gooch, "Adversarial Attitudes: Servicemen, Politicians and Strategic Planning, 1899-1914" in Government and the Armed Forces in Britain 1856-1990, ed. Paul Smith (Hambledon Press, 1996)
'A Military Transformed: Adaptation and Innovation in the British Military 1792-1945' ed. Michael Locicero (Helion, 2014)
That should get you a core understanding from which you can expand your knowledge.
TheMeanDM wrote: I never understood the WW I tactic of throwing millions of men headlong directly at each others trench.
Probably the best mindset you can have when looking at any period of history is that if something just does not make any sense at all, then you're probably misunderstanding what happened.
And that's the case here. There was never a plan to throw masses of infantry straight at a trench. From the earliest days of trench fighting there was constant experimentation in doctrine to find the best ways of capturing trench lines.
Now, many of those doctrines failed. For instance at the Somme the offensive was preceded by an incredible artillery barrage that was was expected to cripple the defenses. But it was unknown that artillery drops in effectiveness the longer it continues, particularly the morale impact. So over time, even over the course of the Somme campaign, doctrine changed towards shorter artillery attacks with infantry assaults following closely behind - a far more effective tactic, but one that wasn't always executed perfectly (infantry assaults being delayed often gave defenders time to react).
FFS invade somewhere there wasn't a trench to hurtle into...
Take a port city and stage a mainland invasion...
Invade from a connected country (you mean, like the Germans did?!?)
Trying to advance around the enemy defenses was the whole reason for the race to the sea. Once that phase was finished there was no connected country you could attack through. And a seaborne invasion was near impossible given the tech of the time - look at the debacle of Gallipoli, and note the Turks there had nothing like the equipment the Germans could bring to bear to defeat an invading force.
Trying to advance around the enemy defenses was the whole reason for the race to the sea. Once that phase was finished there was no connected country you could attack through. And a seaborne invasion was near impossible given the tech of the time - look at the debacle of Gallipoli, and note the Turks there had nothing like the equipment the Germans could bring to bear to defeat an invading force.
You seem more well read on WW1 than I, so perhaps can answer this question. As you mention there being no connected country you "could" attack through. . . Yet we know that Switzerland exists. Would an invasion into Switzerland (which is what any flanking maneuver would be seen as) rally even your own allies against you, or was the Swiss military just that damn good in their own borders?
Do_I_Not_Like_That wrote: True, but bear in mind that poison gas was supposed to be the solution for solving the problem of dug in infantry.
Somebody correct me if I'm wrong, but the Germans developed some particularly nasty poison gas
As Grey Templar notes, everyone had lots of nasty gas. The problem was the gas wasn't really that helpful in clearing a trench because direct casualties were limited and not often fatal. As a tool of supression it would have been good as enemy troops wearing bulky facemasks are way less effecive, but your troops would be advancing in to that gas, so they'd also have to wear masks, and their effectiveness dropped way more than the defender.
As a result gas was more often used as an area denial weapon, covering an area you were retreating from. As with so much in the war, it was another tech that ended up aiding the defender.
Though it was also in counter-artillery work. The aim wasn't to kill the enemy artilery crew, but making them put on their chemical gear dropped the rate of fire enormously.
Automatically Appended Next Post:
TheMeanDM wrote: Whenever someone says "With all due respect" they really have none...so just save the stupid empty platitude and man up to simply say "I think you are wrong and here is why".
While not as up on my WWI history, it still doesn't take away from the fact that they *did* fight some of WWI with the same mentality and approach they did prior wars in the prior century.
"The Armies that marched off to war and clashed in August 1914 operated on essentially 19th century doctrines, large units of riflemen were screened by cavalry and supported by artillery."
And the war at that time was a war of mobility. When both sides have room to flank the enemy then cavalry screens and infantry trained mobility made sense. But after the Germans were beaten at Marne, and the race to the sea ended with neither side rolling their enemy's flank, then both sides were facing a new, static war. At which point tactics rapidly evolved.
That doesn't mean doctrine was perfect in all ways at the start. But it's really not at all like the situation you're claiming.
And note in the East, where they had rifles, trenches, machine guns and all the rest it was a mobile war throughout. The difference was space.
Automatically Appended Next Post:
Ensis Ferrae wrote: You seem more well read on WW1 than I, so perhaps can answer this question. As you mention there being no connected country you "could" attack through. . . Yet we know that Switzerland exists. Would an invasion into Switzerland (which is what any flanking maneuver would be seen as) rally even your own allies against you, or was the Swiss military just that damn good in their own borders?
Enough of Switzerland is mountainous that attacking Switzerland is nightmarish enough, trying to attack through Swtizerland in to another country would be near impossible.
Trying to advance around the enemy defenses was the whole reason for the race to the sea. Once that phase was finished there was no connected country you could attack through. And a seaborne invasion was near impossible given the tech of the time - look at the debacle of Gallipoli, and note the Turks there had nothing like the equipment the Germans could bring to bear to defeat an invading force.
You seem more well read on WW1 than I, so perhaps can answer this question. As you mention there being no connected country you "could" attack through. . . Yet we know that Switzerland exists. Would an invasion into Switzerland (which is what any flanking maneuver would be seen as) rally even your own allies against you, or was the Swiss military just that damn good in their own borders?
Switzerlands greatest defence throughout history has always been physical geography. Getting through Switzerland and then into Austria or Germany would be a nightmare. Also, violating their neutrality would severely damage the UK diplomatically.
Sorry to be so salty previously...super long shift dealing with super frustrating folks and I took it out on you. Apologies!
I get that the powers involved didn't start off with the intention of fighting a trench war.
I think my thought/opinion is bes described in the encyclopedia entry: "At the start of the war, most of the world's armies had tactical doctrines based on combat operations consisting of vast sweeping maneuvers and meeting engagements."
That is what I have been trying to show, and how the generals were slow to adapt to the vastly different battlefield and the technology that changed the lethality of war.
The generals couldn't adapt their thinking and tactics to the changes. In fact, in some cases, they *wouldn't* adapt...instead trying to "[concentrate] on ways to restore the old paradigm, failing to understand that the central paradigm of war itself had shifted."
For years these generals and commanders threw men (needlessly and ignorantly) into battles that couldn't be won..or if won, had outrageous body counts.
Did the generals and commanders eventually learn? Yes...of course...but the sheer idiocy, stubbornness, and willfull ignorance of some cost many hundreds of thousands (perhaps millions?) of lives than may had been necessary to win the war sooner.
That is what I have been trying to show, and how the generals were slow to adapt to the vastly different battlefield and the technology that changed the lethality of war.
Slow compared to who and when? For them to be slow, somebody else has to have done it faster; otherwise there's no standard of comparison for judgement.
You have to remember that large scale offensives took considerable time and resources to build up; and each major battlefield was different. A level of firepower which would likely have carried the day in 1914 would have been bludgeoned into the ground by oppositional counter-attacks in 1917. The British Army learned from each and every major attack it launched; the Marne was different to Neuve Chapelle was different to the Somme was different to Cambrai. You keep hanging on to this idea that WW1 battles and strategy consisted of nothing but throwing men over the top Blackadder style to walk calmly into machine gun rounds. And it just isn't true.
That is what I have been trying to show, and how the generals were slow to adapt to the vastly different battlefield and the technology that changed the lethality of war.
Slow compared to who and when? For them to be slow, somebody else has to have done it faster; otherwise there's no standard of comparison for judgement.
You have to remember that large scale offensives took considerable time and resources to build up; and each major battlefield was different. A level of firepower which would likely have carried the day in 1914 would have been bludgeoned into the ground by oppositional counter-attacks in 1917. The British Army learned from each and every major attack it launched; the Marne was different to Neuve Chapelle was different to the Somme was different to Cambrai. You keep hanging on to this idea that WW1 battles and strategy consisted of nothing but throwing men over the top Blackadder style to walk calmly into machine gun rounds. And it just isn't true.
Just go slightly off topic, that last scene in Blackadder is ruddy good though.
3 years is "slow" in my opinion...especially when there *were* otherscin the leadership that were advocating different approaches and tactics.
The German artillary general from the east front (Bruchmuller) for example...he accomplished a great many things on that front and was very innovative (a pioneer as they say).
He took that with him into the western front and while the spring offensives under Ludendorff were a failure, you could say that it wasnt a failure due to his tactics (but that of Ludendorff's leadership overall).
Automatically Appended Next Post: There were leaders in both sides that advocated different tactics and strategies but were cast aside by the leadership because it didnt fit their "vision" of how a war should be fought......how many tens of thousands did Haig send to their death needlessly over and over, eh?
TheMeanDM wrote: 3 years is "slow" in my opinion...especially when there *were* otherscin the leadership that were advocating different approaches and tactics.
In your opinion as a bloke sitting here with very little knowledge about the subject a century later. I'm not sure your endorsement (or lack thereof) counts for much here.
There were leaders in both sides that advocated different tactics and strategies but were cast aside by the leadership because it didnt fit their "vision" of how a war should be fought......how many tens of thousands did Haig send to their death needlessly over and over, eh?
Basic historical revisionism. Happens very regularly and is not true as often than it is. Everyone has an axe to grind; and just because you manage to get it into print doesn't mean anything necessarily. Look at Beatty's attacks on Jellicoe post-WW1. Christ, look at Churchill rewriting Gallipolli. Even Haig had an axe to grind against French; let alone J.F.C. Fuller against Haig.
I think I'm going to stop now though; because with the best will in the world; you know nothing about the subject but what you're pulling from an encyclopedia. And trying to argue against that is just making me look like a condescending arrogant prig (well, I do that to myself most likely, but still). Mistakes were certainly made in WW1; but the British high command (and those of other nations) were not guilty of what you appear to think they were.
And what makes you such an expert and your opinions so much better than mine?
I use *some* information from a credible source that better expresses my thoughts on the subject and you say I don't know anything...or that I don't know enough.
TheMeanDM wrote: And what makes you such an expert and your opinions so much better than mine?
I use *some* information from a credible source that better expresses my thoughts on the subject and you say I don't know anything...or that I don't know enough.
I give up trying to have a conversation
I'm not trying to put you off having a conversation and if that's what comes off, I apologise for that. What I'm trying to do is demonstrate that the subject really isn't as simple as it might superficially appear to someone who knows the beginning and end, and direct you towards sources/trains of thought which would allow you to begin critically assessing the first world war more effectively. The first step here isn't to declare that they were all doctrinally bound sheep leading lions, but to try and understand more accurately what actions the high command /did take and why they made those decisions.
Otherwise you're just making up opinions with no real factual basis or understanding, which is rarely a good thing.
TheMeanDM wrote: Sorry to be so salty previously...super long shift dealing with super frustrating folks and I took it out on you. Apologies!
I get that the powers involved didn't start off with the intention of fighting a trench war.
I think my thought/opinion is bes described in the encyclopedia entry: "At the start of the war, most of the world's armies had tactical doctrines based on combat operations consisting of vast sweeping maneuvers and meeting engagements."
That is what I have been trying to show, and how the generals were slow to adapt to the vastly different battlefield and the technology that changed the lethality of war.
The generals couldn't adapt their thinking and tactics to the changes. In fact, in some cases, they *wouldn't* adapt...instead trying to "[concentrate] on ways to restore the old paradigm, failing to understand that the central paradigm of war itself had shifted."
For years these generals and commanders threw men (needlessly and ignorantly) into battles that couldn't be won..or if won, had outrageous body counts.
Did the generals and commanders eventually learn? Yes...of course...but the sheer idiocy, stubbornness, and willfull ignorance of some cost many hundreds of thousands (perhaps millions?) of lives than may had been necessary to win the war sooner.
As I said earlier, people forget how fast the early battles of 1914 were. There was a lot of rapid movement and manoeuvre going on. Tannenberg, where the Germans defeated the Russian invasion of East Prussia, is one such example. Austria's invasion of Serbia was quite quick, but was repelled by stout Serbian defence.
And of course, 1918, with the German Spring offensive, and the Allies 100 days campaign, was also speedy.
It was the in-between that was slow.
And let's not forget that WW2 had lengthy battles as well. The siege of Leningrad was 3 years. Stalingrad was 4-5 months, it took the Allies till August to break out of Normandy after landing in June, and it took the Red Army 2 years to get from Kursk to Berlin.
Lloyd George was a leader that disagreed with Haig's strategy.
Churchill, I feel, was actually less than supportive/approving of his tactics especially after Somme (as was much of England, really.
But what I have been trying to simply state, that Haig carried out antiquated tactics and really didn't adopt new strategies that may have saved lives, is confirmed by the man himself even years after the war had ended:
"I believe that the value of the horse and the opportunity for the horse in the future are likely to be as great as ever. Aeroplanes and tanks are only accessories to the men and the horse, and I feel sure that as time goes on you will find just as much use for the horse—the well-bred horse—as you have ever done in the past."
That is just demonstrably false. It is true that a lot of British military thought went 'backwards' after the war, that was a product of the belief that the First World War would was horrific enough that another major European conflict would be unlikely to occur. The British turned their attention back to The Empire, and in terms of policing a colony or putting down rebellion, the statement that aircraft and armour are auxiliary to infantry and cavalry is a fair one. Planes and tanks even at the time were massively more expensive to produce and maintain than infantry and cavalry units, and when facing native forces, small insurgencies or local unrest, of very limited use.
To judge the performance of Haig (and his contemporaries) during the First World War, you must examine their record in the war itself, and there, the claims you've made are just untrue. As Ketara mentioned above, each major offensive was conducted in a way that reflected the lessons of the previous ones, and while it's possible to suggest that at times, the 'wrong' lessons were learned, to say there was no change at all and to accuse the generalship of pig-headed stubbornness and refusal to adapt is just wrong.
To illustrate, let's examine the evolution of the use of armour.
The first use of tanks by the British comes on the Somme in 1916. Here, they are employed in too small a number and spread too thinly. Many have mechanical issues, and the infantry fail to exploit the breaches made by armour. This can probably be considered a failure by the metric of ground gained, though as mentioned before, it was not without strategic value given the nature of attrition on the Western Front.
Now, look at Cambrai, 1917. Tanks are deployed in much more concentrated formations. Cavalry are employed in an attempt to exploit the gaps made, should the infantry get bogged down and be unable to do so. This attack is a success at first, though a German counter-offensive retakes much of the lost ground. The British overextended here, and lacked the staying power or momentum to hold the ground they had taken.
Finally, Amiens, 1918. Tanks are used s the spearhead of an combined-arms assault. Infantry advance with rather than behind them, holding ground as they take it. Aircraft are used to provide more efficient communication, spot concentrations of anti-tank weaponry for the artillery or observe enemy forces massing for a counterattack. The aims of this offensive are limited and local, which prevents the British from overextending and to take only the ground they can comfortably hold. This is perhaps one of the most successful Allied operations of the war, as part of the Hundred Days offensive that ultimately led to victory over Germany.
Across these three battles, you can observe a clear learning curve, which sits fundamentally at odds with the idea that British command were backwards-thinking buffoons unable or unwilling to adapt or learn. The evidence is right there. If you want further reading on this subject, I suggest taking a look at the work of Jonathan Boff, Tim Travers and Gary Sheffield; they represent a lot of the work that's been done to dispel the myth of British incompetence and stagnation on the Western Front.
Lloyd George was a leader that disagreed with Haig's strategy.
Churchill, I feel, was actually less than supportive/approving of his tactics especially after Somme (as was much of England, really./
I actually process a lot of stuff with Churchill's signature on from his time as First Lord of the Admiralty; and whilst remarkably prescient in many ways, he tended to have blind spots just as large. Like most people really. A bit like how Lloyd George insisted that any factory should be able to turn out a shell during the munitions crisis, roped in a lot of non-specialist firms, and ended up essentially instigating the creation of vast quantities of unusable shell. Both were ultimately politicians who had a limited understanding of military matters; and their opinions should always be taken with a degree of salt. Churchill especially, as he deliberately set out to pervert the couse of history and aggrandise himself.
But what I have been trying to simply state, that Haig carried out antiquated tactics and really didn't adopt new strategies that may have saved lives, is confirmed by the man himself even years after the war had ended:
Paradigm has laid out quite well where you need to be looking in terms of major engagements and relevant authors if you want to learn about British strategical development over the course of the war (don't ever give Gary Sheffield too much to drink though, or you'll learn more than you ever wanted to know on the subject ).
"I believe that the value of the horse and the opportunity for the horse in the future are likely to be as great as ever. Aeroplanes and tanks are only accessories to the men and the horse, and I feel sure that as time goes on you will find just as much use for the horse—the well-bred horse—as you have ever done in the past."
I believe horses carried out most of the logistical backbone in the subsequent world war; so he wasn't actually incorrect.
I keep saying that the "throw more men at the enemy, and keep throwing" tactic essentially didn't change quickly enough...and was repeated.
The casualty numbers speak for themselves in just 2 campaigns.
Somme (400k+ Brit casualties) was the first major Brit offensive.
Third Ypres (250k min Brit casualties) was Haig's second major offensive. The numbers are fuzzy, as some estimates of Brit casualties go upward of nearly 500k.
Regardless...it was the *same* attrition strategy. With the same bloody results.
But finally toward the end (the 100 Days Campaign) new tactics were adopted and they finally proved effective (as evidenced by the end of the war).
Again...all I have been saying is that the tactics didn't evolve fast enough due to the stubborn mentality of the overall commamder of British forces.
Show me what he did differently in Somme and TY. I woukd like to know....because I am really only seeing a difference later.
Automatically Appended Next Post: Edit: looks like you did go into an explanation.
I believe horses carried out most of the logistical backbone in the subsequent world war; so he wasn't actually incorrect.
Yes, but Haig wasn't talking about horses as beasts of burden. His vision of war was centered on cavalry assaults as a direct factor in battle, which they pretty much stopped being during the American Civil War. It just took Europe fifty more years to wake up to the fact. True, the Russians got some use out of their cavalry on the Eastern Front, but that front was a different animal compared to the Western Front, and even still, they took a bunch of casualties.
Frankly, not every general in WWI deserves a reputation as an idiot or a fool. But some do. Cadorna, von Falkenhyn, Potiorek, Enver Pasha, and I would propose Haig. His subordinate officers in the Canadian and Australian divisions were figuring out new tactics that were showing promise and were worth developing further, and he was sitting back fantasizing about horse charges. He spent as much time fighting political enemies in London as he did the German army and he was far more successful against his countrymen than against the Kaiser.
Lastly, I want to mention something an earlier poster touched on; about Verdun being a plan by the Germans to bleed the French army out of the war... There is some evidence that shows that may not have been von Falkenhyn's plan at all. All of the available writings from the war itself indicate von Falkenhyn was planning a standard, by the book, let's try to break through the enemy lines, style of attack. His actions during the battle seem to bear this out, as well. If the plan was to fight defensively and force the French to knock themselves out of the war with futile counter attacks, why didn't the Germans go on the defensive until the last minute? They were on the offensive for almost the entire battle. That's a tactic that kills more of your men than it does the other guy when you're in trench warfare. They had taken enough of the Verdun territory and outer forts (though not the town proper) to achieve a solid defensive position in the first few weeks, but they kept pressing forward in the face of stiffening French resistance. When it became obvious the French weren't going to be pushed back any further, the Germans kept pushing forward and getting thrown back. The conduct of the German army during the battle don't seem to indicate a plan of "let's let them kill themselves on our defenses" at all. In addition, the only documents that indicate von Falkenhyn's plan was to bleed France come from his own writings made *after* the war. Nothing written during the war corroborates his plan to force France into a decisive battle of attrition at Verdun.
It seems that von Falkenhyn, like a lot of generals, tried to rewrite history to make himself look better.
Perhaps the idea was to bleed them white, but then like many things the "moment" got to them and they tried to force too much in an attempt to "break" the French by actually taking Verdun?
I honestly have not read too much on that battle beyond the high-level though, so my opinions are ill-founded and just a gut instinct at this point.
I believe horses carried out most of the logistical backbone in the subsequent world war; so he wasn't actually incorrect.
Yes, but Haig wasn't talking about horses as beasts of burden. His vision of war was centered on cavalry assaults as a direct factor in battle, .
I'm not sure about that. You have to accept that the 'soldier and his horse' occupied far more in the way of military utility than 'Charge at the Enemy' (this isn't Waterloo, after all), and that's the full context which Haig was talking about. We're also talking about encirclement, reconnaisance on the ground level, hitting supply lines, and strategically moving bodies of troops from point A to B. Whilst tanks had more or less stolen the thunder of the Cavalry breaking an enemy defensive line through sheer momentum and gusto by the end of the First World War; the utility of cavalry in those other roles (which tanks were ill equipped to replace them in) remained present to an unknown degree. It took the continued development of the motor vehicle and the internal combustion engine before that occurred. By the time you reach the stage of the Aufklärungsabteilung in WW2; what you have in effect is the scouting/transport functions having been entirely mechanised in a way that replaced those cavalry functions.
But that's not to say that those future developments would have been immediately apparent to a decrepit retired old man in the mid 1920's. When WW1 ended, large scale mechanised infantry was still a thing of the future, with existing vehicles mechanically unsuited to the rough terrain and lack of regular servicing points. It wasn't until the Experimental Mechanised Force of 1927 was initiated that such things became more than vague futuristic theory.
The American Civil War showed the limitations of cavalry in modern warfare fifty years earlier. The only effective uses that didn't result in lots of dead horses were reconnaissance and harassment. The largest cavalry engagement of the war was at Gettysburg. It was Union cav vs Confederate cav, and it was pretty much a draw. Cavalry was too specialized to be used to ferry large bodies of troops around; we used mules for that, and largely only against the Indians after the war.
Now, the roles that cavalry traditionally performed on the battlefield were still important, but we hadn't figured out quite how to replace them. It is why horses stuck around for so long even after they had shown their severe limitations. They were obsolete due to the types of weapons being used, even though we didn't have a replacement for the horses that could do the job better than them.
Then the tank was invented and we had our replacement.
It didn't happen right away, of course. It took a while for tanks to become reliable enough, mobile enough,and fast enough, but tanks largely took over the battlefield role of the horse in modern armies by WWII.
Haig's assertion wasn't that "cavalry" would be valuable in future wars. If it was, he would be right. The "Air" cavalry of the Vietnam War, the "Armored" cavalry of the modern tank division, mechanized transport of infantry; all are important extensions of "cavalry" in modern warfare.
Haig was banging on about horses. And he wasn't using cavalry to provide reconnaissance, because trench warfare. And he wasn't having them harass supply lines, because trench warfare. And he wasn't having them encircle anything, because trench warfare. And he wasn't using them to move his troops around, because trains and trench warfare. He was using his infantry to try to punch a hole in the German lines so his cavalry could charge straight through to Berlin. And we all know how that turned out.
I believe the statement from Haig on the last page was post-war, and in that context, it does make sense. Again, post-war, the British concerned themselves with the Empire, ignoring Europe for the most part. Thus, their thinking revolved around colonial policing, combating insurgency and maintaining a presence abroad at the minimal cost. At no point did Haig (or any British commander) act as if a cavalry charge could simply break the German lines in WW1, so to say they did is just disingenuous.
In the kind of war post-1918 Britain was planning for, cavalry in the traditional sense was still of great use; mounted men could easily break a riot, could traverse rough ground/poor roads far more efficiently than a tank, cost far less to employ and didn't require anywhere near as much logistical support. When you're dealing with rebels, riots and guerrilla forces, a tank (especially one of that era) offers very little that cavalry (and later the armoured car) didn't.
Up until the mid 30s (by which point Haig was dead), very few people in Britain expected another mass, industrialised, European war. Now that, one might argue, represents a lack of foresight, but it's clear the 'next war' Haig refers to is one expected to be a much more traditional, colonial affair as that was where Britain's strategic concerns lay in the immediate post-war period.
It is also true that cavalry (although really mounted infantry to be honest) played a much larger role in the more open Eastern and Mesopotamian fronts.
Mounted infantry is not a new concept, and it was definitely still relevant during and after WWI, until replaced by mechanised transports as mentioned. Haig may have personally served at the Western front, but the British army also fought in theatres in WWI where cavalry still played an important part. His comments post-war do not only reflect a Western front perspective, but warfare in general, and in the colonial context as Paradigm points out.
squidhills wrote: The American Civil War showed the limitations of cavalry in modern warfare fifty years earlier. The only effective uses that didn't result in lots of dead horses were reconnaissance and harassment. The largest cavalry engagement of the war was at Gettysburg. It was Union cav vs Confederate cav, and it was pretty much a draw. Cavalry was too specialized to be used to ferry large bodies of troops around; we used mules for that, and largely only against the Indians after the war.
As noted above; this is a remarkably North American-centric perspective. Cavalry played a large role in the Boer War for example; which was much closer to the First World War in terms of armament, time period, and the actors involved. And even there, British cavalry doctrine was constantly learning and mutating into one synchronised with modern technology. To quote from Stephen Badsey:
In a wider military history con-text, the main impact of the Boer War was that it fostered a number of British military reforms made before the First World War of 1914–18. Of these, one was that by 1908, alone among the major powers of Europe,
the British Empire had the only cavalry entirely armed with an infantry rifle rather than a shorter carbine, together with a tactical doctrine based on dismounted firepower and on synchronising a mounted charge with flanking or supporting fire, giving the British a marked advantage over their enemies....Douglas Haig, who would serve as chief staff officer to the Cavalry Division in South Africa, wrote in 1890 that “unless a cavalry force is by instruction and practice ready to fight on foot its usefulness will be curtailed and it cannot be considered efficient.”
See 'The Boer War (1899–1902) and British Cavalry Doctrine: A Re-Evaluation' in the Journal of Military History, 2007 for more detail on that. Immediately pre-war, British cavalry had already evolved more into a 'dragoon' format; functioning as infantrymen as much as cavalrymen. And that role was one which even by the end of the First World War had yet to be replaced by mechanisation; especially in the far flung reaches of the Empire (where innumerable small conflicts far from complex logistical chains and supply depots existed).
It didn't happen right away, of course. It took a while for tanks to become reliable enough, mobile enough,and fast enough, but tanks largely took over the battlefield role of the horse in modern armies by WWII.
Not just the tank. The aircraft, the motorcycle, and the APC combined with it to create the mechanised forces which replaced the horse on the battlefield.
Haig was banging on about horses. And he wasn't using cavalry to provide reconnaissance, because trench warfare. And he wasn't having them harass supply lines, because trench warfare. And he wasn't having them encircle anything, because trench warfare. And he wasn't using them to move his troops around, because trains and trench warfare.
The quote above was taken from Haig in the interwar period. Not much trench warfare around then, and not a huge amount of it around beforehand. WW1 was a relatively unique occurrence, and a conflict twenty years earlier or later had considerable differences. Every conflict usually has its own peculiarities which emphasise the character of the warfare; and whilst cavalry might not have been much use in trench warfare, it is a far cry to say that it could never have possibly had a use again after that. Immediately dubbing something as obsolete and discounting it is just as strategically/tactically closeminded as slavishly adhering to it beyond all reason.
He was using his infantry to try to punch a hole in the German lines so his cavalry could charge straight through to Berlin. And we all know how that turned out.
The quote originally cited was taken from Haig in the interwar period. Haig wasn't obssessed with having his cavalary 'charge straight through to Berlin' in WW1, he was interested in what could dubbed as 'Breakthrough'. He wanted to push through the enemy defensive line beyond the point whereby reinforcements/artillery could be brought up to plug the gap, and get far enough that:
a) new defensive lines of the same depth could not be thrown up to impede a more general advance,
b) German supply and other trench lines would be severely vulnerable to being flanked and encircled, and
c) The war could resume a more mobile state which would reduce the numbers of casualties being suffered through attritional trench warfare.
Had tanks been first introduced in large enough waves as a separate force rather than doled out piecemeal as infantry support; he might even have succeeded. In which case the cavalry would have been the only arm mobile enough (cavalry can live off the land, move quickly, and don't require vast amounts of logistical support like WW1 tanks did) to seriously push into German lines before new defensive networks could be re-established. Hating on Haig for being an out of touch commander obssessed with re-enacting Waterloo cavalry charges hasn't been fashionable (or considered entirely accurate) for quite some time now. It was promulgated by the likes of Churchill and Liddell Hart as a way of getting at Haig and has been substantially revised in recent years.
"I believe that the value of the horse and the opportunity for the horse in the future are likely to be as great as ever. Aeroplanes and tanks are only accessories to the men and the horse, and I feel sure that as time goes on you will find just as much use for the horse—the well-bred horse—as you have ever done in the past."
I believe horses carried out most of the logistical backbone in the subsequent world war; so he wasn't actually incorrect.
My understanding was it was mostly the Germans who used horses as the logistic backbone of their army because they didn't have the resources to build and fuel heaps of support vehicles that could have replaced horses. The Soviets also used a lot of horses when considered as a total number, but weren't as reliant on them when considered as a % of their force because they had the resources (and some supplied by other allies) to allow greater mechanisation.
"I believe that the value of the horse and the opportunity for the horse in the future are likely to be as great as ever. Aeroplanes and tanks are only accessories to the men and the horse, and I feel sure that as time goes on you will find just as much use for the horse—the well-bred horse—as you have ever done in the past."
I believe horses carried out most of the logistical backbone in the subsequent world war; so he wasn't actually incorrect.
My understanding was it was mostly the Germans who used horses as the logistic backbone of their army because they didn't have the resources to build and fuel heaps of support vehicles that could have replaced horses. The Soviets also used a lot of horses when considered as a total number, but weren't as reliant on them when considered as a % of their force because they had the resources (and some supplied by other allies) to allow greater mechanisation.
I'll take your word for it; WW2 sadly falls a good twenty years beyond my purview for the most part. I daresay there's plenty of people on here who know more than me about that one.
I'll grant that my point of view is North American-centric, and that my knowledge of the Boer War isn't up to par. Victim of the American public school system, here.
But many of the things the British were learning about cavalry in the Boer War, the US had already figured out during the Civil War. Yes, the technology of the Civil War wasn't the same as in WWI, but it was close enough to show the shortcomings. Haig was learning to have his cavalry fight as dismounted infantry in 1900? Good for him. The most important cavalry action at Gettysburg wasn't the battle on the third day; it was General Buford's holding action where his cavalry force fought as infantry against the advancing Confederate army on the first day. We had cavalry commanders who knew that traditional cavalry was on the way out by mid-war (1863).
I think one of the reasons that Americans seem to agree with the "WWI generals are all idiots" stereotype is that Europe learned the lessons of modern warfare in WWI, whereas we learned it during the Civil War. Our generals made many of the same mistakes that yours would make eventually. So a lot of Americans approach WWI tactics with the benefit of fifty years of foreknowledge from the Civil War. We have a broad "our generals would never have done anything as dumb as yours did" attitude that isn't really borne out by the facts. After all, we showed up three years late and Pershing did everything he could to keep us away from actual battle until 1918. We didn't have many opportunities to show that we would've done things differently. I half think Pershing was trying to wait it out to see if offensive tactics improved to the point where he could commit his forces without suffering the kinds of losses the British and the French had. Maybe if we'd been there on day one, our generals would look as bad as everyone else's, but we got the benefit of not getting involved until the tacticians had started to sort out what not to do in trench warfare.
I think one of the reasons that Americans seem to agree with the "WWI generals are all idiots" stereotype is that Europe learned the lessons of modern warfare in WWI, whereas we learned it during the Civil War.
I'm not sure I'd agree with that. The American Civil War had a plethora of observers from all European nations, and many lessons were taken away from it. Furthermore; it is difficult to seriously contend that the American Civil War in any way demonstrated the advent of a form of modern warfare predominantly revolving around poison gas, machine guns, heavy rifled quick firing breech loading ordnance, submarines, battleships, tanks, trenches, or frankly, any of the major aspects of the First World War. Not only had Britain/France/Russia conducted the Crimean war within historical spitting distance of the Civil War, the French and Germans had actually fought the reasonably large scale Franco-Prussian war a short time afterwards. Don't get me wrong, the Civil War showcased all kinds of interesting things; but the only military developments of mild interest that I can think of to emerge from America in the subsequent fifty years were Harveyed armour and the Zalinski dynamite gun.
Well, those and Ericcson's submarine gun, but that one never even got off the ground.
None of the Civil War Generals or high rankers of note were alive by the time the First World War rolled around, and frankly, America spent the 1880's onwards looking to Europe for military equipment and lessons. They had no arsenals of note at that time; the military was a chronically underfunded bureaucratic nightmare with an isolationist streak a mile wide. When America fought Spain in 1898, no strategic genius or knowledge not equally apparent in practically every other large scale European engagement was in effect. At the Battle of San Juan hill, the Americans dealt with modern firepower by effectively mass swarming the defenders with bodies; no different to any early WW1 engagement (they suffered five times the losses despite outnumbering the Spanish many times over). Doctrine for items such as artillery changed so much in the intervening period that I'm really not convinced it's transferable knowledge at all. When you see all the iterations that the British Army Handbooks went through over the Civil War to WW1 period; you realise that they were constantly changing and learning from various conflicts. I don't know what lessons the American army pulled out of the Civil War; but I'd really be extremely surprised to learn that it was the same sorts of tactics/strategies which they would then go on to apply fifty years later.
I'll be plain, my knowledge of American history is not great, so I'm willing to be corrected on this. But from where I'm sitting, I regularly read dispatches from American naval and army commanders surveying/poaching off foreign military expertise and developments in the pre-war period. Not leading the charge, as it were.
I'm no expert on American history, but American history is a hobby of mine, so I have some info on the US military between the Civil War and WW1.
For obvious reasons, once the Civil War was over, the vast majority of troops faced one of 3 scenarios:
1. Sent home and disarmed becuase you were on the losing side.
3. Garrison duty in the defeated South.
3. Mass demobilization, because the Federal government no longer needed an army of that size.
The US military then switched its attention back West, because the frontier was still expanding, and Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull were making a mockery of the US cavalry.
Custer, a general in the civil war, stayed in the army, because his pre-war West Point commision was worth something, unlike the civil war volunteers, who got told to hit the road. Custer had a choice to stay or go.
Anyway, more plains wars occured, the US military went back to chasing Native Americans, US Marines would pop up in China for the Boxer rebellion, you've already mentioned the Spanish-American war, and some American general with funny eyebrows would try and kill off the development of the Lewis Gun, and later tell Congress that the Army's machine guns were fine, even though they were hard to use at night.
C&Rsenal, a youtube channel, does a great documentary on the Lewis Guns and other world war 1 weapons.
And pre-WW1, Congress would laugh at the US Army for wanting to increase troop numbers to 25,000.
Long story short, yeah, you're right - the US didn't have a lot to offer Europe's militaries, and that would be the case in early WW2 as well.
squidhills wrote: I'll grant that my point of view is North American-centric, and that my knowledge of the Boer War isn't up to par. Victim of the American public school system, here.
But many of the things the British were learning about cavalry in the Boer War, the US had already figured out during the Civil War. Yes, the technology of the Civil War wasn't the same as in WWI, but it was close enough to show the shortcomings. Haig was learning to have his cavalry fight as dismounted infantry in 1900? Good for him. The most important cavalry action at Gettysburg wasn't the battle on the third day; it was General Buford's holding action where his cavalry force fought as infantry against the advancing Confederate army on the first day. We had cavalry commanders who knew that traditional cavalry was on the way out by mid-war (1863).
Well, then it is good that those commanders never had to fight on the Eastern front of WW1, or the Russian Civil War and the wars that originated from that. For something on the way out, traditional cavalry played a pretty damn important role in those conflicts.
The nature of warfare on the Western front meant that cavalry could not play a decisive role, but cavalry armed with lances, pistols and sabres did not become obsolete in any way until motor vehicles (and good roads and railroads) became widespread enough to replace them in the 1930's and 40's.
You're right that Europe had lots of observers over here during the Civil War. You may not be right about the lessons they learned from it. I'd heard of assessments by European observers who claimed that the Americans were not using cavalry "correctly" because we'd been using it for recon, supply raids, and as dismounted infantry, instead of the way it had traditionally been used in European warfare.
Yes, Crimea was fought very closely to the time of the Civil War. And there is a school of thought which puts forward the idea that Crimea, not the Civil War is the first true Modern War. I'm no expert on Crimea, so I can't say if they are right or wrong to do so, but I will say the argument I've seen makes sense.
But just because the Civil War did not have *exactly* the same weapons as WWI had, you cannot make the claim that it didn't serve as a preview of WWI. There weren't Maxim guns during the Civil War, but we did have Gatling guns, which filled the same role: crew-served, rapid-fire, anti-infantry guns that made massed assaults on defensive positions costly in the extreme. We didn't have battleships with 12" guns, but we had ironclads, which fought an indecisive naval engagement and spent the rest of the war as shore bombardment platforms. Bit like how WWI played out for the surface fleets, huh? We had extensive trench works during sieges, and General Longstreet even encouraged Lee to fight a purely defensive war, because he saw defensive tactics were going to rapidly outpace offensive tactics in effectiveness. Lee's ego didn't permit him to listen, otherwise we would've seen a lot more trench lines popping up in the countryside. We had our own miniature Battle of Messines Ridge with the Battle of the Crater (Union forces undermined a Confederate trench and set enough dynamite under it to put it on the moon). We had the first submarine to sink an enemy ship. True, it wasn't a major factor on the battlefield, but it did show what could be done and that the technology was there to be developed. We had a massive naval blockade of the entire Southern coastline, for the purpose of starving the Confederacy of war materiel, not entirely unlike the British blockade of much of the European coast to starve Germany. Observation balloons for spotting enemy movements, telegraphs for communications (WWI had telephones, but the principle is close enough) our artillery was longer-ranged and more accurate than in decades prior, heck even infantry firepower increased massively by war's end. We didn't have Enfields or Kar 98s, but the Winchester and Henry repeating rifles allowed an infantryman to fire multiple rounds before reloading.
And my point was never that the US led the way in military development, training, and weaponry in the prewar period. Nowhere did I say that. I just said they got a preview (albeit a slightly incomplete one) of WWI in 1861, and figured out that modern war was going to suck. You are correct that the US Army was a joke between the 1880s (after the Indian Wars) and 1917. That has nothing to do with the Civil War being a preview of WWI; that has its roots in the US being both isolationist and lacking an empire to safeguard, and on a general distrust of standing armies inherited from the Revolutionary period. Americans historically let their army languish in mediocrity and failure between wars because having an army meant they were like those guys over in Europe who liked to use their armies to force other countries to do what they wanted (at least to an American of the era...) Of course after fighting Spain they wound up with an empire, just like those guys in Europe, but ours wasn't an empire no sir, it was completely different, because we're the good guys just ask us... Heck, our army was still a joke between WWI and WWII. The US only started having a decent standing army after 1945.
As for casualties at San Juan Hill; those weren't professional soldiers. Those men, even the officers, were volunteers. They were not the relative handful of guys in the US Army who had actual military experience and training. They were bored guys who volunteered to go kick Spain in the taint because they thought it would be a fun thing to do on an afternoon. It was kind of like if an anime forum on the internet fielded a regiment of volunteer soldiers in Iraq or Syria. There is a reason we don't do armies that way anymore.
squidhills wrote: You're right that Europe had lots of observers over here during the Civil War. You may not be right about the lessons they learned from it. I'd heard of assessments by European observers who claimed that the Americans were not using cavalry "correctly" because we'd been using it for recon, supply raids, and as dismounted infantry, instead of the way it had traditionally been used in European warfare.
Couldn't say. My specialty is from about 1880 onwards. I know the bare bones of various related subjects and can track military developments in Europe back to 1860 with reasonable depth; but given that every war is different, I'd be inclined to say that any lesson learned in any war is really only as useful insofar as you run into similar conflicts. WW2 panzer on panzer experience isn't of much use in suppressing insurgents in Iraq, you know? Tactics that served well against Boer fighters weren't so hot against Germans in trenches. There's a good saying about how every military prepares for the last war.
Yes, Crimea was fought very closely to the time of the Civil War. And there is a school of thought which puts forward the idea that Crimea, not the Civil War is the first true Modern War. I'm no expert on Crimea, so I can't say if they are right or wrong to do so, but I will say the argument I've seen makes sense.
But just because the Civil War did not have *exactly* the same weapons as WWI had, you cannot make the claim that it didn't serve as a preview of WWI. There weren't Maxim guns during the Civil War, but we did have Gatling guns, which filled the same role: crew-served, rapid-fire, anti-infantry guns that made massed assaults on defensive positions costly in the extreme. We didn't have battleships with 12" guns, but we had ironclads, which fought an indecisive naval engagement and spent the rest of the war as shore bombardment platforms. Bit like how WWI played out for the surface fleets, huh? We had extensive trench works during sieges, and General Longstreet even encouraged Lee to fight a purely defensive war, because he saw defensive tactics were going to rapidly outpace offensive tactics in effectiveness. Lee's ego didn't permit him to listen, otherwise we would've seen a lot more trench lines popping up in the countryside. We had our own miniature Battle of Messines Ridge with the Battle of the Crater (Union forces undermined a Confederate trench and set enough dynamite under it to put it on the moon). We had the first submarine to sink an enemy ship. True, it wasn't a major factor on the battlefield, but it did show what could be done and that the technology was there to be developed. We had a massive naval blockade of the entire Southern coastline, for the purpose of starving the Confederacy of war materiel, not entirely unlike the British blockade of much of the European coast to starve Germany. Observation balloons for spotting enemy movements, telegraphs for communications (WWI had telephones, but the principle is close enough) our artillery was longer-ranged and more accurate than in decades prior, heck even infantry firepower increased massively by war's end. We didn't have Enfields or Kar 98s, but the Winchester and Henry repeating rifles allowed an infantryman to fire multiple rounds before reloading.
But the thing is, you can make claims like the above about practically any conflict by identifying common features between them. For example, Napoleon had observation balloons, sponsored submarine research, had the battle of Trafalgar deploying warships with cannons to break the British blockade, faced light infantry with rifles on the field of battle as well as twentieth century style mounted dragoons, etcetc. I suppose you could say that the American Civil War had more common features; but then again, so did the Boer War, the Opium War, the Franco-Prussian conflict, and dozens of others. I'd say I could identify just as many (frankly, more I should think) such features in those wars. I really don't think the American Civil War deserves any particular primacy for common identifying attributes over much closer conflicts like as the Russo-Japanese war. Sure there was a submarine in the American Civil War, but then again, there were swords in WW1 too and I wouldn't claim Roman battles were a precursor to WW1.
As a point of general historical accuracy for those who might be interested; some of the above points aren't quite as common to the First World war as you might think. For example, the 'ironclad' actions of the American Civil War weren't true ironclads; they were just standard wooden ones with plates bolted on as opposed to actually being ships made from steel. Neither fish nor fowl nor good red herring as the saying goes. The ships of WW1 were as different to them as modern warships now are to those of WW1 vintage.
And my point was never that the US led the way in military development, training, and weaponry in the prewar period. Nowhere did I say that. I just said they got a preview (albeit a slightly incomplete one) of WWI in 1861, and figured out that modern war was going to suck.
Ketara wrote: For example, the 'ironclad' actions of the American Civil War weren't true ironclads; they were just standard wooden ones with plates bolted on as opposed to actually being ships made from steel. Neither fish nor fowl nor good red herring as the saying goes. The ships of WW1 were as different to them as modern warships now are to those of WW1 vintage.
Actually, you'll find that the ironclads of the Civil War were true ironclads, because that's where the term originated. Ironclads were wooden ships "clad in iron" as opposed to made of the stuff from the ground up. Although, in the case of the USS Monitor, every bit that stuck up above the water line was made of metal (and it had a rotating turret!) as opposed to just metal slapped on a wooden frame (as the CSS Virginia/Merrimac was).
As for all wars having loose parallels to WWI if you tilt your head and squint your eyes enough, I have to call shenannigans on that. The Civil War had distinct and proximate parallels to WWI that you don't have to twist yourself into a pretzel to see. Napoleon may have funded submarine research, but he never got a working example that sank an enemy ship during hostile action. President Jeff Davis did. Yes, Napoleon's infantry had rifles, but not ones that held seven to nine rounds of ammo (more than the French or Germans had in WWI!), allowing their operators to "Load on a Sunday and shoot all week". And yes, the Boer War had more advanced weapons and was temporally closer to WWI, as was the Russo-Japanese War, but the American Civil War was the earliest large-scale conflict that hit all of the same notes as WWI, apart from airplanes and poison gas. We averaged almost as many casualties in a single battle than the UK suffered in the entire Second Boer War. 22,000 dead in a three year period is not a preview of WWI. 800,000 dead in a five year period is (and those are just Union losses). I don't know about British historians, but on this side of the Atlantic, the Civil War is considered the first Modern War due to all of the similarities (though as I said earlier, the guys claiming we should give that honor to the Crimean War make a compelling argument). My history teachers all said it: "First Modern War". My history professors said it: "First Modern War". Heck, those two guys I know who do re-enactments say it: "First Modern War". Europeans may feel differently, but I think that may come from Europe largely discounting the US during that period of history. We didn't have an empire, we were isolated by distance and oceans, and we spoke English the wrong way and spelled half of the words wrong. Europe kind of looked at the US as a curiosity, rather than a rival for power on the world stage. I think that may explain why European historians want to point to the Russo-Japanese War as their "preview" of WWI; it was a European War therefore it holds historical merit, while the Civil War was an American war, therefore it was a curiosity with no bearing on how a European war would develop.
I'm not saying you're wrong to discount the Boer War or the Russo-Japanese War as previews of WWI. I'm not saying you're wrong to consider them better previews, even. I'm just disagreeing with your willingness to dismiss the Civil War as an equally valid preview of WWI, or to dismiss the very real similarities between the two wars.
At any rate, this conversation has gotten me thinking about something, and I'd like to ask a question and get your opinion...
So, over here, we are taught that the Civil War was our preview of WWI and that our generals learned that charging a defended trench work manned by guys armed with modern weapons would result in staggering losses, and they would never do that again, because it was stupid. The thing is, the next war we fought was against Spain. And Spain barely bothered to show up for that war. The volunteer army performed astonishingly poorly (you mentioned San Juan Hill and that was just one example) and the US only won that war because Spain somehow managed to perform even worse than we did. Our army was so chock full of untrained volunteers at every level that we can't say if any lessons actually were learned from the Civil War, because nobody who would have learned those lessons was in any kind of command. So we move on to WWI. We only suffered 50,000 or so killed in that war. But we only showed up in very late 1917 and we didn't see combat until 1918. Are our comparatively light losses a result of better tactics on our part? Or is it because by the time we showed up the Brits and the French had finally developed combined arms offensives that resulted in more gains than corpses allowing us to benefit from their hard-earned knowledge? Or was it because by the time we showed up Germany was so on the ropes that simply by putting boots on the ground we secured victory for the Entente?
TL;DR We say we learned the lessons of modern war from the Civil War, but did we? When did we prove that? Between 1880 and 1917 we fought one war against a modern-ish military, and the war was the real-life version of a shoot out between an Imperial Stormtrooper and a Star Trek Redshirt (ie: the Stormtrooper fires and misses. The Redshirt dies anyway). Did we prove we learned the lessons in WWI or did we just benefit from our allies' prior experience?
Actually, you'll find that the ironclads of the Civil War were true ironclads, because that's where the term originated. Ironclads were wooden ships "clad in iron" as opposed to made of the stuff from the ground up. Although, in the case of the USS Monitor, every bit that stuck up above the water line was made of metal (and it had a rotating turret!) as opposed to just metal slapped on a wooden frame (as the CSS Virginia/Merrimac was).
I'm not referring so much to the etymological roots of the word as to what was considered to be an 'ironclad' in the 'ironclad' era itself. The French threw together the first one in the shape of the Gloire initially which was, like the American Civil War versions, a wooden ship with iron armour plating bolted on. The British then decided to go one better for their first 'ironclad' HMS Warrior (viewable today if you care to visit England) which was made entirely out of iron. Warrior was considered so superior to the Gloire version of battleship that the decision was quite rapidly made that future ironclad designs absolutely had to be made fully out of iron. So what you find is that whilst a number of these 'semi-ironclads' were made in all countries; they were usually wooden battleships which had already been laid down being converted due to being judged pointless in the face of the all metal ironclad. That or because the country in question lacked the technical capability to build all metal ironclads.
Consequently once you move into the 1870's, you'll find that most naval commanders automatically exclude such ships as being utterly useless for calculation of ironclad strength and don't actually consider them to be ironclads. They consider the first Warrior style ironclads as useless and barely counting (much like pre-dreadnoughts post 1906), but 'semi-ironclads' literally don't even figure into the calculations. They're just considered to be mongrel 'half-clads' (as one commander put it). It's only in the eyes of their contemporaries when they were first built, and those of historians trying to determine 'the Age of the Ironclad' that they're considered as such.
As for all wars having loose parallels to WWI if you tilt your head and squint your eyes enough, I have to call shenannigans on that. The Civil War had distinct and proximate parallels to WWI that you don't have to twist yourself into a pretzel to see. Napoleon may have funded submarine research, but he never got a working example that sank an enemy ship during hostile action. President Jeff Davis did. Yes, Napoleon's infantry had rifles, but not ones that held seven to nine rounds of ammo (more than the French or Germans had in WWI!), allowing their operators to "Load on a Sunday and shoot all week".
I'll be honest, I don't entirely disagree. It did have parallels moreso than all those pre-1850 conflicts, I'm quite happy to concede that. It's more the basis of the specific examples you're using to try and justify the statement that I find problematic. Trying to say that both had submarines and therefore were similar is logically like me saying that the Battle of Agincourt also had swords and is therefore similar. It's the same again with the Gatling (a gun that wasn't automatic, powered by a crank, treated as artillery, and had a direct contemporary in the Agar gun). It's not the sort of rule I'd try and define similarity between conflicts on.
Essentially, I would assert that any number of legitimate parallels (scale, technical changes, adaptation to more modern systems, etc) you could draw between the Civil War and WW1; you could also draw with the earlier Crimean Conflict. I also think that the most immediate pre-war example of the WW1 'style' of warfare would actually probably be the Russo-Japanese war in terms of equipment, strategy, & tactics. The American Civil War just slots in with the Third War of Italian Independence, Boer war, Franco-Prussian conflict, and several other such wars in the category of 'Pre-WW1 wars that featured some similarities to it'. Depending on which aspect you're looking at, you could find more or less parallels to WW1 in any individual one.
I think I'm probably splitting hairs to be honest though, so I'll shut up one that one now.
So we move on to WWI. We only suffered 50,000 or so killed in that war. But we only showed up in very late 1917 and we didn't see combat until 1918. Are our comparatively light losses a result of better tactics on our part? Or is it because by the time we showed up the Brits and the French had finally developed combined arms offensives that resulted in more gains than corpses allowing us to benefit from their hard-earned knowledge? Or was it because by the time we showed up Germany was so on the ropes that simply by putting boots on the ground we secured victory for the Entente?
TL;DR We say we learned the lessons of modern war from the Civil War, but did we? When did we prove that? Between 1880 and 1917 we fought one war against a modern-ish military, and the war was the real-life version of a shoot out between an Imperial Stormtrooper and a Star Trek Redshirt (ie: the Stormtrooper fires and misses. The Redshirt dies anyway). Did we prove we learned the lessons in WWI or did we just benefit from our allies' prior experience?
I'll be honest, the Americans showed up militarily in WW1 just in time for the victory parade more or less. What was more important in their involvement in that conflict was their economic muscle. By the time the Americans started heading into battle, the Ludendorff offensive (Germany's final military throw of the dice) had been exhausted. They were out of reserves, out of resources, technically outmatched, outnumbered, and out of steam. Out of everything, in effect. Their final offensive had captured a huge amount of new territory; but they could never have held it; it had cost them a fifth of their remaining men to do it. They were effectively reduced to a shrinking defensive only force at that point in time. Even had the American troops not arrived; the still increasing British war machine (production of munitions and men to use them kept going up) would likely have ground them under over the next year or two (the French were doing less well).
Into this environment dropped the American army; with the benefit of every piece of received tactical/strategical wisdom and technical advance that the British and French could give them. What the American troops gave the Allies was the ability to rotate exhausted units off the front line, man a more in depth defence more generally, launch multiple attacks up and down the line, and build up their offensive potential more quickly. In short, they gave what was left of the Entente the ability to finish the war a year or two earlier by giving Allied attacks that little more oomph.
So in answer to your question, I think the Civil War had nothing to do with American performance in WW1. How could it? American tank design and tactics were learnt from the Allies. The hard-won methods of planning/launching large scale offensive movements was drawn from British/French commanders (you don't get the experience for that sort of thing from a history textbook). The superficial similarities with WW1 and the Civil War in no way gave American Commanders any kind of special or unique experience in launching successful assaults. Nobody survived from one to the other, and everything from small unit tactics to large scale planning, to the weapons involved was significantly different.
I find it very interesting that that is how it's taught in American schools though.
Thanks for the response. I must admit, I've been moving towards that viewpoint over the last few years, as I learn more about WWI. I just wanted to see if someone with more knowledge thought the same way. I guess it is just showing another weak spot in how Americans are taught history.
The Americans were the real winners of WW1. Not because they did the most or showed those silly Europeans how it was done, but by the merit of showing up fashionably late to the party. The Russians went down in revolution, Austria-Hungary was broken up, France ravaged, Germany Versaille'd, and Britain bankrupted. The Americans effectively strolled in, and for the price of 100,000 casualties, made innumerable fortunes, sat high at the peace table, gained every European technical advance free of charge, and got to wean their new army to combat.
Had they stayed uninvolved, I suspect the war would have dragged for another year and a half beyond; but then Germany would have been broken up at the end of it back into the Germanic states (preventing WW2) and America would have been left miles behind in terms of combat experience and military technology. They really did join at just the right moment (for them). Hat off to the President of the time for playing his realpolitik cards right.
Ketara wrote: The Americans were the real winners of WW1. Not because they did the most or showed those silly Europeans how it was done, but by the merit of showing up fashionably late to the party. The Russians went down in revolution, Austria-Hungary was broken up, France ravaged, Germany Versaille'd, and Britain bankrupted. The Americans effectively strolled in, and for the price of 100,000 casualties, made innumerable fortunes, sat high at the peace table, gained every European technical advance free of charge, and got to wean their new army to combat.
Had they stayed uninvolved, I suspect the war would have dragged for another year and a half beyond; but then Germany would have been broken up at the end of it back into the Germanic states (preventing WW2) and America would have been left miles behind in terms of combat experience and military technology. They really did join at just the right moment (for them). Hat off to the President of the time for playing his realpolitik cards right.
Wait... So if the US had not got involved into WW1 then WW2 would never have happened? I knew it! WW2 is all the fault of the Americans! My friends in the Kremlin are going to love this
In all seriousness, had the war dragged on for another year and a half, cost that many more lives, and seen all that ground taken in the Ludendorrf offensive ravaged, I can't see the French having been willing to let Germany survive as a political entity. With America restraining them and it having ended when it did it was hard enough. We'd probably have gone back to Prussia, Bavaria, etc with a semi-permanent occupation that made the Ruhr look low-key.
I keep saying that the "throw more men at the enemy, and keep throwing" tactic essentially didn't change quickly enough...and was repeated.
The casualty numbers speak for themselves in just 2 campaigns.
Somme (400k+ Brit casualties) was the first major Brit offensive.
Third Ypres (250k min Brit casualties) was Haig's second major offensive. The numbers are fuzzy, as some estimates of Brit casualties go upward of nearly 500k.
Regardless...it was the *same* attrition strategy. With the same bloody results.
But finally toward the end (the 100 Days Campaign) new tactics were adopted and they finally proved effective (as evidenced by the end of the war).
Again...all I have been saying is that the tactics didn't evolve fast enough due to the stubborn mentality of the overall commamder of British forces.
Show me what he did differently in Somme and TY. I woukd like to know....because I am really only seeing a difference later.
Automatically Appended Next Post: Edit: looks like you did go into an explanation.
Also forgetting the French and Germans who suffered demonstrably greater casualties time and again, doing the same damn thing.
Why not defeat the German navy and land in the Netherlands?
Frazzled wrote: Why not defeat the German navy and land in the Netherlands?
Probably because that would have been an even worse place to fight than the trenches if the Dutch didn't agree to let forces pass. Blow up bridges, flood areas, mine the canals... It would have been a nightmare. And probably even worse for international standings than invading the suspiciously neutral Swiss.
Frazzled wrote: Why not defeat the German navy and land in the Netherlands?
Probably because that would have been an even worse place to fight than the trenches if the Dutch didn't agree to let forces pass. Blow up bridges, flood areas, mine the canals... It would have been a nightmare. And probably even worse for international standings than invading the suspiciously neutral Swiss.
Fair enough (I am confusing WWI and WWII occupation), then northern Belgium.
Ketara wrote: The Americans were the real winners of WW1. Not because they did the most or showed those silly Europeans how it was done, but by the merit of showing up fashionably late to the party. The Russians went down in revolution, Austria-Hungary was broken up, France ravaged, Germany Versaille'd, and Britain bankrupted. The Americans effectively strolled in, and for the price of 100,000 casualties, made innumerable fortunes, sat high at the peace table, gained every European technical advance free of charge, and got to wean their new army to combat.
And the USA didn't have to drop the gold standard following WW1 like other nations involved. It got even better for the US at the end of WW2, where they had basically all the gold, and other countries used USD in place of gold. That's why countries use USD as reserve currency to this very day, even though the US abandoned the gold standard in the 70's. Good old economic inertia.
Long story short, yeah, you're right - the US didn't have a lot to offer Europe's militaries, and that would be the case in early WW2 as well.
I agree with you in the sense that we didn't have a lot to offer in terms of fresh, new military thought/theory.
What we did have to offer, particularly when the US arrived in Europe in 1917, was fresh bodies. It wasn't until Fismes/Fismette that Pershing got what he wanted: American troops fighting under command of American generals. I actually wrote a paper on Fismes and Fismette, focusing on some of the troops from the 112th Infantry regiment (part of the 28th division), and I honestly think that it was a battle which would have far reaching consequences in terms of doctrine and training.
TheMeanDM wrote: I get that the powers involved didn't start off with the intention of fighting a trench war.
I think my thought/opinion is bes described in the encyclopedia entry: "At the start of the war, most of the world's armies had tactical doctrines based on combat operations consisting of vast sweeping maneuvers and meeting engagements."
There's two parts to this, and one part you're partially right. Tactical doctrines were out of date. As an example, just last night I was reading about a prototype French semi-auto rifle developed in 1907 (it was an interesting design ultimately rejected for cost and reliability). It was noted the rifle was incredibly long - not for accuracy or range, but just because French tactical doctrine wanted a rifle that could be fired two ranks deep, and the longer barrel meant troops at the back would have the rifle's barrels forward of the front rank. Yeah. It was the 20th century and a great power had a doctrine calling for firing two ranks deep. So there's some case that doctrine was way out of step with the reality of modern war.
However, you're still working with the false assumption that trench warfare was inevitable and that meant the static, attritional nature of war on the Western front was inevitable. It wasn't. It was only in Western Europe where the front became static. In the East, in the ME, and everywhere else there was fighting the lines changed frequently. In Russia for instance, trench lines were dug, but due to the much greater space for fighting it was possible to outflank, and if the defender drew his lines wide enough to prevent that, then it became thin enough to exploit somewhere.
That is what I have been trying to show, and how the generals were slow to adapt to the vastly different battlefield and the technology that changed the lethality of war.
And what people have been explaining, very patiently I think, is that there was a great deal of adaption. The early period of mass infantry movements gave way to trench warfare, and soon as you see that then you see rapid developments in offensive and defensive tactics. For instance, Germany quickly moved from attempts to out maneuver the Western allies, and instead focused on picking battles that could force far more French casualties than they suffered themselves - Verdun. Germany achieved a positive kill-loss ratio in the conflict, but nothing like what was needed. But the war in the East was going far better than expected, so the Germans adapted, developing the Hindenburg Line. This line gave up ground to narrow the front, but more importantly it redesigned how an area was defended - instead of a trench line defended by a mass of infantry instead you saw hardpoints and fortifications deployed in depth, designed to slowly yield ground while inflicting heavy casualties, until elite troops would be released in counter-offensives to retake the lost ground.
In contrast, the early actions at the Somme were disastrous for the English. But contrary to myth this wasn't because the English had learned nothing from the first two years of the war. They actually had developed effective squad based tactics, but did not think those complex operations could be undertaken by the troops at the Somme, as they were freshly raised troops with little training and no experience in war. Instead the English thought immense artillery would suffice, this was mistaken but hardly a foolish notion. But the English rapidly adapted, and after the first week they actually killed as many as they lost. They moved towards combined arms and closer co-ordination between air, artillery and infantry in each offensive.
In fact, it was British advances in doctrine over the Somme, along with the declining German strategic position, that caused Germany to move to the Hindenburg Line. And the British then adapted to the Hindenburg Line, changing to tactics of bite and hold, isolating and taking each hardpoint in isolation, and not advancing until each position was secure.
I mean, tanks weren't developed by idiots stuck in old forms of battle. Hell, tank doctrine changed massively from the Somme to Cambrai, and massively again by Amiens. (edit - whoops, Paradigm made this exact point )
I'm not saying there wasn't plenty of inexplicably awful doctrine, but there was also a lot of very intelligent and rapid adaptation. Same as any war, really.
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TheMeanDM wrote: But what I have been trying to simply state, that Haig carried out antiquated tactics and really didn't adopt new strategies that may have saved lives, is confirmed by the man himself even years after the war had ended:
"I believe that the value of the horse and the opportunity for the horse in the future are likely to be as great as ever. Aeroplanes and tanks are only accessories to the men and the horse, and I feel sure that as time goes on you will find just as much use for the horse—the well-bred horse—as you have ever done in the past."
The statement wasn't wrong, given the tanks and aircraft at that time. The thing you have to realise is that you win battles in two ways - either by breakthrough and exploitation collapsing the enemy army, or by attrition. Attrition was a war of infantry and artillery, supplemented by the rest. Breakthrough was combined arms, where exploitation would be achieved by cavalry.
In WW2 exploitation could be carried out by tanks and mechanised infantry, but in WW1 tanks were not mechanically reliable enough, and their supporting infantry was still on foot. As such tanks were a breakthrough weapon, exploitation would still be left to cavalry.
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TheMeanDM wrote: The casualty numbers speak for themselves in just 2 campaigns.
Somme (400k+ Brit casualties) was the first major Brit offensive.
The Germans lost more than 400,000 men as well.
Third Ypres (250k min Brit casualties) was Haig's second major offensive. The numbers are fuzzy, as some estimates of Brit casualties go upward of nearly 500k.
German casualties are also fuzzy, but on par with allied casualties.
Regardless...it was the *same* attrition strategy. With the same bloody results.
But finally toward the end (the 100 Days Campaign) new tactics were adopted and they finally proved effective (as evidenced by the end of the war).
Both sides in the 100 days offensive lost about a million men each. So your metric of 'attrition is bad' makes zero sense if you think the 100 Days Campaign was somehow better.
And what you're missing is that tactics used in the 100 Days weren't just suddenly tried out of the blue. They were the result of years of small and large innovations, and the deployment of new weapons. And beyond that, they were made possible because the environment had changed considerably. The hard, continuous trench line was gone, the Spring offensive combined with declining German manpower and moral made a lot of new tactics wildly more effective. For instance, infiltration tactics suddenly began paying huge results, flanked and surprised German positions of hundreds of men would surrender to a handful of infiltrators. It wasn't that sneaking up on the enemy at night was a new idea - its that it would have been suicide against the defences and committed German troops of 1914-17.
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Easy E wrote: Perhaps the idea was to bleed them white, but then like many things the "moment" got to them and they tried to force too much in an attempt to "break" the French by actually taking Verdun?
I honestly have not read too much on that battle beyond the high-level though, so my opinions are ill-founded and just a gut instinct at this point.
Attrition is a complicated strategy to execute. The German high command couldn't tell operational commanders, let alone rank and file, that the plan was to feed them in to a meatgrinder so that the French would put more of their own in to a meatgrinder. You got to give them objectives, ground to capture. So in execution attrition can end up a huge mess. That's on top of the usual mess of command and control that you normally get in WW1.
As to whether it was the 'real' German plan... there's hardly any direct evidence either way. I also don't really get the debate, even if the intent was different at the outset it became a war of attrition very quickly. And in terms of assessing Falkenhayn - if it was an operation to capture Verdun... it failed. If it was an attritional war to bleed France white... it failed.
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squidhills wrote: The American Civil War showed the limitations of cavalry in modern warfare fifty years earlier. The only effective uses that didn't result in lots of dead horses were reconnaissance and harassment.
You need to add in exploitation, and then you have a list of three of the most important things in war, besides firepower.
I get what you're saying that cavalry were still in the role just because nothing had come along to do it better... but I think you're missing that the Western front 1915-1918 was a really unusual environment. It wasn't replicated elsewhere in the world, and in those places horses were still an essential element of fighting.
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squidhills wrote: But many of the things the British were learning about cavalry in the Boer War, the US had already figured out during the Civil War. Yes, the technology of the Civil War wasn't the same as in WWI, but it was close enough to show the shortcomings. Haig was learning to have his cavalry fight as dismounted infantry in 1900? Good for him. The most important cavalry action at Gettysburg wasn't the battle on the third day; it was General Buford's holding action where his cavalry force fought as infantry against the advancing Confederate army on the first day. We had cavalry commanders who knew that traditional cavalry was on the way out by mid-war (1863).
I think one of the reasons that Americans seem to agree with the "WWI generals are all idiots" stereotype is that Europe learned the lessons of modern warfare in WWI, whereas we learned it during the Civil War. Our generals made many of the same mistakes that yours would make eventually.
This is getting very strange. The complaint was the British were idiots for believing in cavalry through WWI and afterwards. While the Americans had learned the limitations of cavalry in the ACW.
But the US raised a cavalry division specifically for WW1, and after the war the US raised three more cavalry divisions.
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squidhills wrote: As for all wars having loose parallels to WWI if you tilt your head and squint your eyes enough, I have to call shenannigans on that. The Civil War had distinct and proximate parallels to WWI that you don't have to twist yourself into a pretzel to see.
Yes, but it also had such massive differences that claiming Europe should have known what was coming becomes utterly false. We can look now and see the very limited value of cavalry on the Western Front, but it's pure nonsense to claim that's a lesson to be learnt from the ACW. Any army trying to fight in ACW without cavalry would have found itself failing to locate the enemy, stumbling in to ambush, and seeing its lines of supply and communication constantly broken. Cavalry played that role in every campaign in WW1 other than the Western Front, because it was only there that the lines ran from coast to coast.
My history professors said it: "First Modern War". Heck, those two guys I know who do re-enactments say it: "First Modern War". Europeans may feel differently, but I think that may come from Europe largely discounting the US during that period of history. We didn't have an empire, we were isolated by distance and oceans, and we spoke English the wrong way and spelled half of the words wrong. Europe kind of looked at the US as a curiosity, rather than a rival for power on the world stage. I think that may explain why European historians want to point to the Russo-Japanese War as their "preview" of WWI; it was a European War therefore it holds historical merit, while the Civil War was an American war, therefore it was a curiosity with no bearing on how a European war would develop.
I'm not saying you're wrong to discount the Boer War or the Russo-Japanese War as previews of WWI. I'm not saying you're wrong to consider them better previews, even. I'm just disagreeing with your willingness to dismiss the Civil War as an equally valid preview of WWI, or to dismiss the very real similarities between the two wars.
Ultimately I think this is a bad question. War doesn't have some sudden paradigm shift. The minie ball and other developments changes the ACW and that level of firepower probably felt very modern at that time, but the massed musketry of the Napoleonic Age would have felt very modern as well.
Hell, even WW1 you still had armies moving at the speed of foot, with offensive operations being comunicated back with signal flags. Even WW2, once you look past the pointy end of the spear and in to the logistics you see horse and cart, and very limited communications. If anything anywhere was going to be considered a truly modern army, I think that distinction goes to the US in WW2, because it had all the weapons, logistics and communications of a modern army.
So we move on to WWI. We only suffered 50,000 or so killed in that war. But we only showed up in very late 1917 and we didn't see combat until 1918. Are our comparatively light losses a result of better tactics on our part? Or is it because by the time we showed up the Brits and the French had finally developed combined arms offensives that resulted in more gains than corpses allowing us to benefit from their hard-earned knowledge? Or was it because by the time we showed up Germany was so on the ropes that simply by putting boots on the ground we secured victory for the Entente?
There was still heavy fighting but Germany really was falling apart by that stage. I've never been able to find it since, but I once saw a chart of German desertion, month by month through WW1. You see almost nothing until after the Spring Offensive, then you see enormous rates of surrender and desertion. That was seen by Germany as the last, final, all or nothing push. That it succeeded at first only to finally peter out in to nothing probably made the moral hit all the worse.
Ketara wrote: The Americans were the real winners of WW1. Not because they did the most or showed those silly Europeans how it was done, but by the merit of showing up fashionably late to the party. The Russians went down in revolution, Austria-Hungary was broken up, France ravaged, Germany Versaille'd, and Britain bankrupted. The Americans effectively strolled in, and for the price of 100,000 casualties, made innumerable fortunes, sat high at the peace table, gained every European technical advance free of charge, and got to wean their new army to combat.
Had they stayed uninvolved, I suspect the war would have dragged for another year and a half beyond; but then Germany would have been broken up at the end of it back into the Germanic states (preventing WW2) and America would have been left miles behind in terms of combat experience and military technology. They really did join at just the right moment (for them). Hat off to the President of the time for playing his realpolitik cards right.
Wait... So if the US had not got involved into WW1 then WW2 would never have happened? I knew it! WW2 is all the fault of the Americans! My friends in the Kremlin are going to love this
The question is what Stalin would've done if Germany didn't exist.
squidhills wrote: Seb, you're late. Ketara already kicked my butt on this.
And mine too!
I have definitely learned a grrat deal more from everybody in this thread and through researching for responses than I originally knew of WWI.
So thank you all for that!
I am sure your posts were well intented to be informative, and for my part, sometimes after 12 to 13 hrs of being brain drained by patients, my matience and resiliency is a bit low...so I hope that I didnt't come across as an ass myself.
Certainly been interesting following this thread. I think it is clear that the popular perception of WWI is massively skewed from the actual events of the war.
As another example of adaption of tactics during WWI- the British sniper program. They started the war with no dedicated snipers, and ended it with probably the best sniper doctrine and training of any involved power. Plus an excellent sniper rifle in the Pattern 1914, although despite the name that arrived late in the war in 1917. There was an absolute mess of stopgap conversions to the SMLE using all manner of civilian scopes prior to that. The British Army basically bought up every civilian scope available in the British isles as soon as it became apparent they needed snipers.
Haighus wrote: Certainly been interesting following this thread. I think it is clear that the popular perception of WWI is massively skewed from the actual events of the war.
As another example of adaption of tactics during WWI- the British sniper program. They started the war with no dedicated snipers, and ended it with probably the best sniper doctrine and training of any involved power. Plus an excellent sniper rifle in the Pattern 1914, although despite the name that arrived late in the war in 1917. There was an absolute mess of stopgap conversions to the SMLE using all manner of civilian scopes prior to that. The British Army basically bought up every civilian scope available in the British isles as soon as it became apparent they needed snipers.
It wasn't just with regards to sniping but for prismatic binoculars, rangefinders, and more. The British optical industry prior to 1914 was in a somewhat poor state of things; much of what was turned out in the way of finished products was reliant upon raw/manufactured materials imported from Germany (much like the chemicals/dyestuffs trade). The optical munitions trade was quite distinct from that of commercial optical instruments; requiring specialist designers and skilled workmen few in number outside of a small number of firms in London (barring naval specialists Barr and Stroud in Scotland).
When war broke out in 1914, a large number of instruments already ordered by the War Office pre-war had yet to be delivered, let alone all the men Kitchener immediately set about raising. Excluding gun sights and sight telescopes, 7% of the army required binoculars, and 1 rangefinder was required for every hundred men. That means that even excluding the existing shortfall, the newly raised armies therefore required another 140,000 pairs of binoculars and 10,000 range finders. And finding those instruments was an absolute bloody procurement nightmare.
I'm pulling very heavily from the work of Stephen Sambrook here, and his magnum opus 'The Optical Munitions Industry in Great Britain 1888-1923'. He's an absolutely sterling chap and his book has conveniently been put into a more affordable paperback format lately. Go buy it if you want to know what happened next! https://www.amazon.co.uk/Optical-Munitions-Industry-1888-1923-Business/dp/1848933126
And yes, I am shamelessly plugging the man. He's lent me a hand on some periscope details in the past and his work really should be read more widely; so it's the least I can do.
squidhills wrote: Seb, you're late. Ketara already kicked my butt on this.
Sorry. I live in basically the opposite timezone to everyone so I'm always about 12 hours late. I like to think I'm giving a somewhat different POV or phrasing to what's been said before, but I admit it probably feels a lot like turning up after the battle to stab the wounded
Long story short, yeah, you're right - the US didn't have a lot to offer Europe's militaries, and that would be the case in early WW2 as well.
I agree with you in the sense that we didn't have a lot to offer in terms of fresh, new military thought/theory.
What we did have to offer, particularly when the US arrived in Europe in 1917, was fresh bodies. It wasn't until Fismes/Fismette that Pershing got what he wanted: American troops fighting under command of American generals. I actually wrote a paper on Fismes and Fismette, focusing on some of the troops from the 112th Infantry regiment (part of the 28th division), and I honestly think that it was a battle which would have far reaching consequences in terms of doctrine and training.
I hope I didn't sound too critical of the USA, because yeah, the USA obviously had the manpower and the industrial capacity.
What I meant was the hard learning curve the USA always went through at the beginning of its involvement in both World Wars.
In WW2, you obviously had Kasserine Pass and the Philippines debacle
and in WW1, the harsh realities of trench warfare.
But to give the USA credit, they always learned from the blunders and mistakes.
What I meant was the hard learning curve the USA always went through at the beginning of its involvement in both World Wars.
Good friend of mine wrote a lengthy paper analyzing US casualties in our 20th century wars. . . You're right. There are systemic "problems" that the US military hasn't learned. To be somewhat fair though, each successive war has been different enough from the previous one, that the Vets who were still in and formed the hardened core of the army and were in charge of training, weren't well prepared for the realities of the newer conflict. He relied a little too much on Annales School (IMHO) as I personally think that numbers only tell one part of the story.
One of the most chilling abandoned places in the world is France's Red Zone, or "Zone Rouge".
Over 100 years ago, the First World War so devastated the landscape here that people are still forbidden to enter, & the zone has become a ghostly & overgrown place.
bits of it have now been reclaimed but :
Although today the Zone Rouge has been largely repopulated, there are still no-go areas.
On two pieces of land close to Ypres and Woëvre, a study by Bausinger et al (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17555801 ) found that 99% of plants still die, & arsenic can constitute up to 17% of the soil.
Today, French government démineurs still recover about 900 tons of ordnance every year, & in Belgium the amount is around 200 tons.
According to the Sécurité Civile, at the current rate no fewer than 700 years will need to pass before the area is completely clean.
